Historically, concept inventories have been in the form of multiple-choice tests in order to aid interpretability and facilitate administration in large classes.
This foundation in research underlies instrument construction and design, and plays a role in helping educators obtain clues about students' ideas, scientific misconceptions, and didaskalogenic ("teacher-induced" or "teaching-induced") confusions and conceptual lacunae that interfere with learning.
[6] Results using the FCI have led to greater recognition in the science education community of the importance of students' "interactive engagement" with the materials to be mastered.
[10] In addition to physics, concept inventories have been developed in statistics,[11] chemistry,[12][13] astronomy,[14] basic biology,[15][16][17][18] natural selection,[19][20][21] genetics,[22] engineering,[23] geoscience.
[26] In addition, there are non-multiple choice conceptual instruments, such as the essay-based approach[13] and the essay and oral exams concept to measure student understanding of Lewis structures in chemistry.
While concept inventories designed to identify trends in student thinking may not be useful in monitoring learning gains as a result of pedagogical interventions, disciplinary mastery may not be the variable measured by a particular instrument.
The very structure of multiple-choice type concept inventories raises questions involving the extent to which complex, and often nuanced situations and ideas must be simplified or clarified to produce unambiguous responses.
For example, a multiple-choice exam designed to assess knowledge of key concepts in natural selection[19] does not meet a number of standards of quality control.