Assessing the prior knowledge of students in physics minors

The number of students who give up science and engineering in the first semesters is regrettably high. While there is empirical evidence of the relationship between (lack of) prior knowledge in mathematics and dropout among students with a compulsory minor in physics, there are - to our knowledge - no studies on the relevance of prior knowledge in physics. Therefore, we constructed a knowledge test and statistically validated the results of two pilot studies in consecutive semesters with students from different physics minor programs (n = 643). In this article, we briefly introduce the structure of the test, consisting of three sections (knowledge of facts, knowledge of meaning, application of knowledge) and the corresponding test parameters. Furthermore, we summarise the first empirical results using descriptive methods. For this purpose, violin plots were created to analyze similarities or differences in the response behaviour of the subgroups. Moreover, an analysis of classical statistics was carried out, e.g. pairwise Mann-Whitney-U tests for comparing sample subgroups. Our results show that subgroups in the overall sample significantly differ in their test results depending on their faculty affiliation.