Assessment of Student Understanding in Physics: An Integrated Qualitative and Quantitative Approach

Assessment of student learning is of critical importance in terms of revealing effective pedagogical learning tools and strategies. This paper reports on a study of student learning of basic mechanics concepts in an introductory physics course. Both qualitative and quantitative assessment strategies were employed. Free-writing activities were used to qualitatively assess student understanding throughout the learning process. Writing has long been shown to serve as an effective tool to improve the quality of student engagement and learning. In this paper, the free-writing approach is described and one exercise from the spring 2010 semester will be presented as it relates to basic concepts in mechanics. A brief summary of student responses to this exercise will be shared. To quantitatively address the question of whether deeper understanding was achieved, results from the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) are presented. The FCI is a widely used multiple-choice, survey-type instrument used to assess student understanding of basic mechanics concepts in physics. The analysis includes a presentation of pre- and post-test gains from the same population of students. The data analysis also includes a discussion of learning gains for the class a whole as well as a comparison of gains between the males and females within the overall student population. Preliminary results suggest that while females have, on average, higher overall grades in the course as well as higher overall GPAs, their gains as measured by the FCI are lower than those achieved by male students. A discussion of the significance of these results will be presented and possible issues related to this apparent gender discrepancy will be proposed.