2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

There is very little understood about how the context of engineering assessment questions can serve to unnecessarily confuse, distract, or indirectly communicate who belongs (and who does not) in engineering classrooms. Globally concept inventories are used to assess students’ conceptual understanding of specific subject areas and study the effectiveness of curriculum efforts targeted toward increasing students’ conceptual understanding of different topics using real word contexts. Using content analysis, researchers reviewed three concept inventories and the sociocultural norms and lived experiences of the represented contexts, which have implications for fairness. The team analyzed and identified the context of over 90 concept inventory questions and created four major categories of questions where different groups of participants may react to the context differently or have difficulty answering the question. The categories were access to technology, culturally sensitive, insider knowledge, and assumed experiences. The context of the question can be essential to answering the question so a lack of understanding of the context could prevent students from accurately answering the question, or the context of the question is not essential to answering the question, but the context can be a distraction. Engineering undergraduate students consist of several racial, ethnic, and cultural groups made up of both domestic and international students. This research team seeks to encourage concept inventory authors to assess the context of the proposed concept inventory items for sociocultural and racial/ethnic awareness.