In the last two decades, the teaching of introductory college physics has undergone a revolution that has been both motivated and guided by the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), a multiple choice test designed so that students must choose between the Newtonian conception of force and common misconceptions. The FCI demonstrated that even students who had excelled on conventional examinations failed to answer the simple, conceptual questions on the FCI correctly. We hope to replicate this educational reform in computer engineering and computer science by developing a battery of concept inventories to evaluate conceptual learning in introductory computing courses. We will present the research process we are using to create concept inventories as well as preliminary results from the development process. We will present the approach we used to find student misconceptions, the misconceptions about Boolean logic that we have found, and how these misconceptions have been adapted to create multiple choice test items for the Digital Logic Concept Inventory.

Geoffrey Herman is a PhD candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His interests include engineering education, audio signal processing, mentoring undergraduate research, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. His current research focuses on discovering student misconceptions in digital logic and developing concept inventories to assess the effectiveness of instruction in correcting misconceptions. He has received the Mavis Memorial Fellowship for doctoral students interested in engineering education and has won the Olesen Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.