Klappholz presents workshop at CCLI Program Principal Investigators (PI) Conference
Stevens professor discusses concept inventories
HOBOKEN, N.J. ― Stevens Institute of Technology Professor David Klappholz presented a workshop at the Course Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) Program Principal Investigators (PI) Conference. The conference was held August 13-15, 2008, in Washington, D.C., and was hosted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Education and Human Resources Programs (EHR) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE).
The conference featured research from 369 PIs of NSF CCLI grants. The conference's organizing committee chose approximately 16% of the PIs to deliver workshops on their research results. Klappholz, Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stevens, was chosen to present his research at a workshop on concept inventories (CI), a type of test instrument used to diagnose students' cognition. CI can detect mismodelings of critical concepts in STEM fields in a way that informs instructors how to correct students’ understanding of the relevant concepts.
The first CI, the force concept inventory, was designed to test students' mental modeling of Newton 's concept of force. Klappholz's research results involve the identification of errors in the structures of many subsequent STEM -field CIs and of their improper statistical validation, and include statistical methods for correct validation. Klappholz planned to identify collaborators at the workshop to work on correctly structured and validated CIs in both his field and in other STEM fields.
The conference was an invitation-only conference and a limited number of invitations were made available to PIs, Co-PIs, administrators, evaluators, publishers and staff from professional societies, foundations and businesses.
About Stevens Institute of Technology
Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value.
Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,040 undergraduate and 3,085 graduate students, and a worldwide online enrollment of 2,250, with a full-time tenured/tenure-track faculty of 140 and more than 200 full-time special faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.
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