Investigating students seriousness during selected conceptual inventory surveys

Abstract

Conceptual inventory surveys are routinely used in education research to identify student learning needs and assess instructional practices. Students might not fully engage with these instruments because of the low stakes attached to them. This paper explores tests that can be used to estimate the percentage of students in a population who might not have taken such surveys seriously. These three seriousness tests are the pattern recognition test, the easy questions test, and the uncommon answers test. These three tests are applied to sets of students who were assessed either by the Force Concept Inventory, the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism, or the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment. The results of our investigation are compared to computer simulated populations of random answers.

8 pages; submitted to Phys Rev PER

References in corpus (7)

• Analyzing Force Concept Inventory with Item Response Theory
• Secondary Analysis of Teaching Methods in Introductory Physics: a 50k-Student Study
• Resource Letter: RBAI-1: Research-based Assessment Instruments in Physics and Astronomy
• A longitudinal study of student conceptual understanding in Electricity and Magnetism
• Best Practices for Administering Concept Inventories
• Research-based assessment affordances and constraints: Perceptions of physics faculty
• Resource Letter RBAI-2: Research-based assessment instruments: Beyond physics topics