Misconceptions are widely recognised as a major contributor to poor assessment performance and limited understanding of curriculum content, ultimately hindering students’ academic progression. Concept inventories are a valuable tool for identifying and diagnosing such misconceptions.(1) However, their development often relies on bespoke or modified procedures, which can raise concerns about validity and reduce confidence in their use across the community.
This work responds to that challenge by developing and evaluating a systematic, transferable procedure for creating validated concept inventories suitable for use worldwide. The talk will illustrate this procedure through its application in designing and piloting a first‑year chemistry concept inventory, tested with three student cohorts outside the United States of America. It will outline our work on degrees taught in the UK and China, highlighting how misconceptions were identified, how they were tested, the outcomes of these tests, and the statistical methods used to establish the instrument’s validity. The focus of our work has been on developing a procedure that enables other to replicate our testing for their own cohorts/curricula without fear compromising validity and confidence of their results.
The tested concept inventory (our curricula) demonstrates that key misconceptions are present across multiple first‑year cohorts (three universities) and has also been benchmarked against foundation‑year groups. No statistically significant difference in performance was observed between cohorts studying the same curriculum delivered in different formats on two continents. Therefore, we have confidence in this route to deliver useful and reliable concept inventories. Based on these findings, the authors propose that this inventory offers a robust tool for detecting misconceptions among first‑year chemistry students and for informing the design of targeted instructional interventions.