Best Practices for Administering Attitude and Beliefs Surveys

TL;DR

This paper provides guidelines for selecting, administering, and scoring attitude and beliefs surveys in physics education to assess students' perceptions and attitudes towards physics learning.

Contribution

It offers practical advice on using attitude and beliefs surveys in physics education, complementing existing concept inventory best practices.

Findings

Effective survey administration improves data quality.

Guidelines help educators interpret students' beliefs about physics.

Survey methods enhance understanding of student attitudes.

Abstract

Physics faculty care about their students learning physics content. In addition, they usually hope that their students will learn some deeper lessons about thinking critically and scientifically. They hope that as a result of taking a physics class, students will come to appreciate physics as a coherent and logical method of understanding the world, and recognize that they can use reason and experimentation to figure things out about the world. Physics education researchers have created several surveys to assess one important aspect of thinking like a physicist: what students believe that learning physics is all about. In this article, we introduce attitudes and beliefs surveys; and give advice on how to choose, administer, and score them in your classes. This article is a companion to Best Practices for Administering Concept Inventories (The Physics Teacher, 2017), which introduces and answers common questions around concept inventories, which are research-based assessments of physics content topics.