Assessing Scientific Practices in Physics Paper-based Assessments

TL;DR

This paper presents a design process for paper-based physics assessments that measure students' ability to integrate scientific practices with concepts, using evidence-centered design and the ACER framework, validated through student interviews.

Contribution

It introduces a novel assessment design approach combining Evidence-Centered Design, the Three-Dimensional Learning Protocol, and the ACER framework for measuring scientific practices in physics assessments.

Findings

Assessments successfully elicited students' ability to blend concepts with mathematics.

Students' written solutions provided evidence of their blending abilities most of the time.

The work enhances understanding of incorporating scientific practices into introductory physics assessments.

Abstract

Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students' abilities to blend conceptually important concepts with practices scientists engage in. To design assessment tasks that can measure these abilities, we leveraged Evidence-Centered Design and the Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol with the focal scientific practice of "Using Mathematics." We conducted video recorded one-on-one think-aloud interviews to explore how students interpreted these tasks. In this paper, we articulate our design process and the analysis of students' responses using the ACER (Activation-Construction-Execution-Reflection) framework. Our assessment tasks elicited students' abilities to blend concepts with mathematics and written solutions elicited evidence of their abilities to blend them most of the time. This work extends our understanding on incorporating scientific practices into paper-based assessments at the introductory level.