Core concepts and concept inventories in disciplines other than pharmacology – how have core concepts and concept inventories proven useful?
Progress and successes when adopting a concept-based curriculum approach have been most transformative in nursing education [15-17]. The broad notion of concept-based teaching is not new; in fact, concept-based curricula have existed for more than 60 years and originally focused on the development of complex thinking[18]. Instead of overwhelming students with an exhaustive list of topics leading to content saturation, a CBC concentrates on a limited number of essential concepts. This serves as the foundation upon which the subsequent learning is built, thus following the original 1960s theories of Ausubel [19], namely making learning more meaningful. Selecting the foundational ‘stable’ core concepts is a critical step when transitioning to CBC approaches in teaching.
A concept-based curriculum requires four major elements: identification and unpacking of the core concepts of the discipline; development of instruments to assess student attainment of core concepts (called concept inventories); validation of those inventories; and finally development of educator and student resources to enable attainment of the concepts.
Many other disciplines have identified and described underpinning core concepts. Over recent decades, fields such as physics [20], statistics [21], information technology [22], psychology [23, 24], physiology [25, 26], and microbiology [27, 28] have developed lists of core concepts and related assessments of concept attainment.
To assess student understanding of core concepts, concept inventories (CIs) are often used. While CIs are typically multiple-choice tests, and thus resemble traditional achievement tests, there are some crucial differences. Most importantly, the content and language CIs are developed on the basis of student thinking and incorporate student language and thinking”, unlike the language of experts used in traditional achievement tests [29]. The beauty of the CI approach is that plausible distractors are based on student misconceptions or alternative conceptions and selecting any answer to the multiple-choice question (MCQ), be it correct or incorrect, provides the instructor with insight into the students’ thinking [29]. Similar information could be obtained from interviews or essay questions; however, such methods are not always feasible in large classes and are less quantitative.
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) was the first to be developed ([20]. This CI tests attainment of physics concepts, and continues to be used in physics education [30], and is now starting to incorporate learning from generative artificial intelligence [31]. CIs have been designed for many disciplines related to pharmacology including chemistry [32], biochemistry [33], and biology [34]. They can be used for a number of purposes such as pre-and post-testing student understanding before a teaching and learning activity, or to identify misconceptions so that teaching can be adjusted accordingly [35, 36]. Thus, CIs have led to improvements in education in physics and other STEM fields [37]. Given the benefits from core concept identification and assessment seen in other disciplines, a group of pharmacology educators are now working to deliver these outcomes. The remainder of this review focuses on this global initiative.