Live Poster Session: Zoom Link
Abstract: In many physics education research studies, students are given a conceptual evaluation prior to instruction, called a “pre-test” and then again after, which is called a “post-test”. It is common to use “normalized gain”, or “normalized change” to characterize student learning in these studies. Normalized gain is calculated by (post – pre)/(100 – pre), and normalized change is calculated in a similar fashion but with slightly different rules for negative gains and instances where students score 0 or 100% in both the pre and post-tests. These metrics, however, do not capture the whole story. Research shows that when students learn physics, they must confront their own misconceptions on how the world works. In addition, these metrics do not consider how serious or non-serious the students were while taking the tests, which brings into question the validity of the data. Therefore, it may be enlightening to look at how paired responses change in pre and post-tests. In this study, we classify the different types of transitions that may occur between the pre and post-test responses and use these transition classifications to create six different metrics that can be used as guides to more accurately describe how students learn the material. Moreover, by using randomly generated pre and post-tests, we can create a range of values in which if students fall into, they are judged to be unserious. We find that productive change, which is one of our metrics, is extremely well correlated with normalized change for both Newtonian Mechanics and Electricity and Magnetism material. In addition, we find that a small percentage of people in the real data can be classified as non-serious. Future research will be focused on understanding how the other metrics we have developed can be best utilized to analyze students’ learning.
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