Genetics Concept Assessment (GCA)
Purpose
The Genetics Concept Assessment (GCA) is designed to test achievement of nine broad learning goals in majors and non-majors undergraduate genetics courses.
Population
The GCA is commonly administered in introductory college genetics courses.
Typical Performance
We haven’t performed an analysis of the LASSO data for typical performance, but the developers of the instrument students found pretest scores around 40% and posttest scores around 74% across the 3 institutions the instrument was initially tested at.
Example question
Validity
The GCA was originally developed in 2008. The validation has focussed on college students but spans several institutions. Items were examined for difficulty, discrimination, and assessment reliability. Relevant articles are listed below:
Smith, M. K., Wood, W. B., & Knight, J. K. (2008). The genetics concept assessment: a new concept inventory for gauging student understanding of genetics. CBE-life sciences Education, 7(4), 422-430.
Research
There are over 260 publications that cite the GCA. We recommend using Google Scholar and the citations listed under validation to find articles of interest.
Example LASSO Report
Please follow this link to our example report for concept inventories.
More Information
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