Analog and digital electronics are core components
of electrical engineering curricula. The project goal is to
develop assessment instrument(s) that measure change in the
conceptual understanding of electronics by students. Development
of the Electronics Concepts Inventory (ECI) began in October
2002. As is the case for several other concept inventories,
the concept inventory consists of multiple parts. For the
ECI, there will be an ECI-Analog that will focus on analog
electronics and an ECI-Digital for digital electronics. During
the 2002–03 academic year, developers at the University
of Massachusetts Dartmouth developed fifty multiple-choice
questions in analog electronics. During the summer of 2003,
developers created a second set of multiple-choice questions
for digital electronics. Both digital and analog parts are
being tested during 2004 year.
The ECI exam was initiated at Rose-Hulman Institute
of Technology by faculty members Marc Herniter, Mario Simoni,
Bruce Ferguson, and Dan Moore. The exam that they are developing
is designed to assess student understanding of introductory
electronics concepts that would typically be covered in the
first course of a two-course sequence. Specific topics include
semiconductor physics, diode circuits, single transistor amplifier
circuits, and device modeling. In addition to the electronics
concepts, a small set of questions on basic circuit analysis
are included, to help remove ambiguity from the statistics
of the exam’s results.
A distinction is made between concepts and
problem-solving performance for the purposes of this exam.
A concept is a fundamental idea used to understand electronics.
Performance is the ability to actually solve problems involving
electronics. Calculations, procedures, and definitions do
not constitute a concept, but all are involved in problem-solving
performance. Mastery of concepts is therefore a necessary
but not sufficient condition for mastery of electronics. As
such, the ECI exam creators differentiate between this concept
exam and a final examination given in a course. Both types
of exams are necessary to provide assessment on different
aspects of knowledge.
These faculty members have generated a first
draft of the 31-question exam. The questions were generated
primarily at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology but include
suggested questions from faculty members at the University
of Arizona. The exam has been used in beta testing on (i)
two student focus groups, with which Don Evans from Arizona
State University was involved, (ii) several sections of the
basic electronics course at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology,
and (iii) three sections of electronics courses from other
universities. The exam is being modified, based on the discussion
from the focus groups and the resulting statistics from the
beta testing.
In addition, the creators are standardizing the ECI by inviting
faculty members from across the country to participate in
its development and beta testing. Twelve faculty members,
each from a different university, have indicated interest
in participating in the development of the exam. Some of these
faculty members have already provided significant contributions,
while others have just indicated their interest in participating
in the development of the exam.
The goal is to compile all of the input from
these twelve faculty members and generate a final version
of the exam by the end of the summer. The exam will be released
for official use in the fall of 2004.
Dean Schmidlin, an electrical engineering professor
at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, has completed
the formulation of the digital electronics concepts inventory
test. He gave it to the professor who is teaching digital
electronics this semester as his UMassD. Dr. Schmidlin also
has a collection of analog electronics problems. He will pull
problems from this collection to formulate an analog electronics
concepts inventory test. This test will be given spring 2005
to the professor who teaches analog electronics at UMassD.
For details on the ECI and the exams, contact
Mario Simoni or
Dean Schmidlin.
You may access "Concepts to Questions: Creating an Electronics
Concept Inventory Exam" (by Simoni, Herniter, and Ferguson)
at http://www.foundationcoalition.org/events/news/conferencepapers/2004asee/simoni.pdf.
