Groundwater is a critical resource globally, and understanding groundwater processes is vital to ensure sustainable management practices. However, there are many widely held misconceptions and inaccuracies about groundwater, and we currently lack tools to measure groundwater knowledge across large populations and measure how groundwater knowledge relates to management decisions or behaviors. Here, we present a survey instrument, the Groundwater Concept Inventory (GWCI), that has been designed for general audiences to measure groundwater knowledge comparable to that in an introductory geoscience curriculum. The GWCI was developed using ∼1200 responses using an online platform, Amazon Mechanical Turks, to represent a general population. Responses were evaluated using the Rasch model that configures a relationship between person-ability and item-difficulty. We found that the study population displayed similar misconceptions about groundwater compared with previous literature, and that age and education were not strong predictors of GWCI scores. The GWCI can be used by researchers to understand links between knowledge and behavior, and also by other stakeholders to quantify misconceptions about groundwater and target resources for a more informed public.

中文翻译：

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开发地下水概念清单以衡量普通受众的地下水知识

地下水是全球的重要资源，了解地下水过程对于确保可持续管理实践至关重要。然而，人们对地下水存在许多广泛的误解和不准确之处，而且我们目前缺乏工具来衡量大量人口的地下水知识以及衡量地下水知识与管理决策或行为的关系。在这里，我们提出了一种调查工具，即地下水概念清单（GWCI），它是为普通受众设计的，用于测量与地球科学入门课程中的地下水知识相当的知识。GWCI 是使用在线平台 Amazon Mechanical Turks 收集约 1200 个回答来开发的，以代表一般人群。使用 Rasch 模型评估响应，该模型配置人员能力和项目难度之间的关系。我们发现，与之前的文献相比，研究人群对地下水表现出类似的误解，而且年龄和教育程度并不是 GWCI 分数的有力预测因素。研究人员可以使用 GWCI 来了解知识和行为之间的联系，其他利益相关者也可以使用 GWCI 来量化对地下水和目标资源的误解，以供更知情的公众使用。