The Survey of Physics Reasoning on Uncertainty Concepts in Experiments (SPRUCE) was designed to measure students' proficiency with measurement uncertainty concepts and practices across ten different assessment objectives to help facilitate the improvement of laboratory instruction focused on this important topic. To ensure the reliability and…

The challenge of accurately assessing critical thinking in physics education, particularly on topics like work and energy, remains a key issue for educators. The current study aims to address this challenge by exploring students' critical thinking abilities using two-tier test data analyzed through the Rasch model. Data were collected from…

The purpose of this study is to develop a test to assess students' level of counterintuitiveness in basic electric circuits. Data from four samples were gathered and used to develop and validate the counterintuitive basic electric circuit test (CBECT). The initial version of the CBECT was administered to the first sample and data collected from…

The aim of this study is to develop and apply a rubric to evaluate the solutions proposed for questions about electromagnetic induction belonging to university second year pre-service teachers. In this study which has pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design with control group, teaching of the topic of electromagnetic induction was applied to…

Problem solving is considered one of the most critical competencies for life. However, many students may perform well in school yet cannot transfer the skills they learned in school to solve real-world problems, especially in science education. This study discusses the characteristics of the problem from the physics education perspective, based on…

It is essential to establish a multi-dimensional postgraduate quality evaluation system for student assessment and training. This study aimed to explore the construction of the multiindex and hierarchical comprehensive evaluation system for postgraduate training in science and engineering based on the Context, Input, Process, Product (CIPP) model…

Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments may provide information about what faculty and/or researchers think it means to know and do physics, i.e.,…

In physics education research (PER), concept inventories (CIs) have become standard instruments for assessing students' learning throughout instruction. To promote widespread use of concept inventories, previous studies have developed an approach to split a full length CI into short versions of CIs. This research extends the existing method to…

This paper describes the second year of a multi-year study on the implementation of Peer Instruction and PeerWise-inspired pedagogies in a physics methods course in a teacher education program at a large research university in Western Canada. In the first year of this study, Peer Instruction was implemented consistently in the physics methods…

As part of ongoing investigations into student learning in advanced undergraduate courses, we have developed a conceptual assessment tool for upper-division electrodynamics (E&M II): the Colorado UppeR-division ElectrodyNamics Test (CURrENT). This is a free response, postinstruction diagnostic with 6 multipart questions, an optional 3-question…

We present the design, statistical analysis, and validation of a questionnaire to assess students' knowledge about basic aspects of quantum mechanics (QM). The QM evaluation (QME) is a true-false and multiple-choice mixed questionnaire that features 10 two-tier items spanning three relevant themes in quantum mechanics: wave behavior of matter,…

We present the Electricity and Magnetism Conceptual Assessment (EMCA), a new assessment aligned with second-semester introductory physics courses. Topics covered include electrostatics, electric fields, circuits, magnetism, and induction. We have two motives for writing a new assessment. First, we find other assessments such as the Brief…

Tabular presentations of student data often hide information about the switches in responses by individual students over the course of a semester. We extend unpublished work by Kanim on "escalator diagrams," which show changes in student responses from correct to incorrect (and vice versa) while representing pre- and postinstruction…

Free-response research-based assessments, like the Colorado Upper-division Electrostatics Diagnostic (CUE), provide rich, fine-grained information about students' reasoning. However, because of the difficulties inherent in scoring these assessments, the majority of the large-scale conceptual assessments in physics are multiple choice. To increase…

Background: In the last few decades, researchers have turned their attention to students' understanding of scientific concepts at different school levels. The results indicate that the learners have different ideas, and most of them are inaccurate in terms of those generally accepted by the scientific community. Purpose: This study was undertaken…