Although many different assessment instruments have been developed, especially for introductory physics, we have found it necessary to develop two new ones. The first is a pioneering of strategic knowledge in mechanics; the second is a series of concept tests that cover material typically covered in a single week of instruction that are suitable for weekly quizzes (Most concept tests, like the FCI, cover several week’s material.)
MRI: Mechanics Reasoning Inventory
We developed a new assessment instrument that directly measures strategic knowledge – essentially how you find which of the facts, concepts, and procedures you’ve been taught apply to an unfamiliar problem. We ask students “which core model (e.g. energy, angular momentum, etc.) applies to this problem and why does it apply”? Or, “Does Newton’s second or third law apply in this situation (or both)?” Or, “Decompose this [complex] problem into subproblems to which a single core model can be applied.” We also used multi-dimensional analysis to check whether the problems cluster around the models we expected, and revised it where it didn’t.
PBC11 Development of a Mechanics Reasoning Inventory Andrew Pawl, Analia Barrantes, Carolin Cardamone, Saif Rayyan and David E. Pritchard Physics Education Research Conference 2011 Volume 1413, Pages 287-290
LCP17 Factor Analysis Reveals Student Thinking using the Mechanics Reasoning Inventory S Lee, Z Chen, D Pritchard, A Kimn, A Paul Proceedings of the Fourth (2017) ACM Conference on Learning@ Scale, 197- 200 (2017)
We showed that most of the MRI items clustered as we designed them, but that students‘ knowledge also depended on understanding circular motion. We redesigned some items that did not load on what we thought we were testing, in one case to disable a heuristic method of solution that might reproduce the observed clustering.
Single Topic Quizzes
We developed a series of short online quizzes for use in weekly quizzing of students. They generally covered one or two of the topics in a standard introductory mechanics course, with both conceptual and short quantitative questions. Research shows that this dramatically increases the reading of the textbook, and is liked by the students (in part because of our policy of dropping the lowest 2 grdes).
DLS18 Online Quizzes Predict Final Exam Scores Better Than Hand-Graded On-Paper Quizzes Byron Drury, Sunbok Lee, Chandralekha Singh, David Pritchard EDM Proceedings 2018 KE Boyer and M Yudelson eds p 557 (2018)
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