Work in progress: combining concept inventories with rapid feedback to enhance learning

In this project our goal is to adapt the concept inventory for frequent classroom use, and to implement it in a system to provide rapid feedback to students of their understanding of key concepts being presented. The feedback system acts as the focal point and catalyst to encourage students, working in pairs, to assist each other in correcting misconceptions or deepening each other's understanding of the topic at hand. Furthermore, the system allows the professor to assess the students' level of comprehension (or misconception) in a just-in-time fashion, and thus guides his or her pacing and coverage of the material. The rapid feedback is enabled through wireless-networked handheld computers. In this first year of the study, we have implemented the system in a lower-level, core-engineering course (engineering mechanics: statics). This paper will focus on the motivation for and the design of this project; our presentation will describe results from the first implementation.