Chapter 1 - The Microbiology Concept Inventory

1 - 1 Obtaining the MCI

First, bravo to you for your dedication in wanting to improve microbiology education. The Microbiology Concept Inventory (MCI) can serve as a part of your effort to make learning in your classroom better. There are actually two microbiology concept inventories to choose from. The MCI is tailored toward courses that teach a course focused on microbiology majors. The Medical Health Sciences Concept Inventory was designed for a non-major, health-sciences related microbiology course. How do you decide which one to use? Here is a useful table to help you decide.

To obtain the MHSCI please contact Heather Seitz (hseitz@jccc.edu)

To obtain the MCI, you need to take three steps

1. Register for the website. You need to have a username at the site so that you can fill out the registration form to obtain the MCI. Once you have a username, the admin of the site will approve you.
2. Once you have approval, ask to receive the MCI form by filling out the registration form
3. You will then be sent a copy of the MCI for use in your classes.

I apologize for the hoops that you have to jump through, but we want to manage access to the MCI carefully. Please do not share the MCI with other researchers, but refer them to this website.

Tim

1 - 2 Using the MCI

The microbiology concept inventory can be used to access learning gains in many different ways. It's most common usage is as a pre- post-test of an entire course to determine where your students are learning, and where they are not. From this information, you can make adjustments to your instructional methods to address any shortcomings. The MCI can also serve to measure various teaching methods and determine what makes an impact and what doesn't.

If you are giving the MCI, you want to do a pre-test before any instruction. For large classes, using a survey site, such as Qualtrics is extremely useful. If you do use Qualtrics, here are two important gotchas I ran across while using it.

1. Make sure the each question has it's coded values correct. Qualtrics assigns a number to each response (1, 2, 3, …) These numbers are assigned based upon when you enter them. If you do this out of order or have to add or delete responses, the numbering will not be in order, and this can confuse your responses. Make sure you check each question after you are done entering the values to make sure A=1, B=2, C=3, and D=4. You can do this by choosing advanced options -> Recode values …
2. When you export your data for analysis, choose Download Data Table, and make sure the Use numeric values radio button is selected. Otherwise, you will get text responses.

After treatment, administer the MCI as a post-test. When you are finished, you can upload your results to this site and the analysis will be done for you.

1 - 3 Analyzing the MCI

Great, you have your data from your treatment. Now you want to know if it worked. What do you do? A common practice is to calculate learning gains for each question and for the whole test. A good method to use is the normalized learning gain, which is the difference between the post-test score minus the pre-test score, divided by 100 minus the pre-test score.

If you like you can do this by hand. However, I have set up a web app that will do this for you and then organize the results based upon the fundamental statements of the ASM. If you would like to use that site, please travel to these two pages.

Survey Upload

Survey Analysis

1 - 4 Frequently Asked Questions

I registered for the site, but I cannot log in.

Did you receive the verification email? In that email is a verification link you need to check before the site lets you log in. This prevents robot registration. If you cannot find the verification email, please check your junk folder.

I could read the book before, but now I have lost access to the chapters.

After a few days, the site automatically logs you out. You probably need to log back in. Check the upper right corner of the homepage. If you see the words Log In, then do so.