There has been a relatively recent focus in the USA on raising academic staff awareness of what students understand about concepts in their courses, and enabling them to actually evaluate students’ understanding as a means of informing instruction and assessment.

Concept inventories are multiple choice questions designed based on a clear assessment criteria, where the options given to students to choose an answer from, are influenced by observed student errors in exams.

Users are advised to use those inventories where rigorous validity tests have been conducted.

Useful links

The Concept of the Concept Inventory Assessment Instrument

Best Practices for Administering Concept Inventories