• Open Access

Analysis of the most common concept inventories in physics: What are we assessing?

James T. Laverty and Marcos D. Caballero
Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 14, 010123 – Published 12 April 2018

Abstract

Assessing student learning is a cornerstone of educational practice. Standardized assessments have played a significant role in the development of instruction, curricula, and educational spaces in college physics. However, the use of these assessments to evaluate student learning is only productive if they continue to align with our learning goals. Recently, there have been calls to elevate the process of science (“scientific practices”) to the same level of importance and emphasis as the concepts of physics (“core ideas” and “crosscutting concepts”). We use the recently developed Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol to investigate how well the most commonly used standardized assessments in introductory physics (i.e., concept inventories) align with this modern understanding of physics education’s learning goals. We find that many of the questions on concept inventories do elicit evidence of student understanding of core ideas, but do not have the potential to elicit evidence of scientific practices or crosscutting concepts. Furthermore, we find that the individual scientific practices and crosscutting concepts that are assessed using these tools are limited to a select few. We discuss the implications that these findings have on designing and testing curricula and instruction both in the past and for the future.

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  • Received 8 November 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.14.010123

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Physics Education Research

Authors & Affiliations

James T. Laverty1 and Marcos D. Caballero2

  • 1Department of Physics, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas 66506, USA
  • 2Department of Physics and Astronomy and CREATE for STEM Institute, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan 48824, USA and Department of Physics and Center for Computing in Science Education, University of Oslo, N-0316 Oslo, Norway

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Vol. 14, Iss. 1 — January - June 2018

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