Probing physics students’ conceptual knowledge structures through term association

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Ian D. Beatty, Assistant Professor (Creator)
William Gerace, Helena Gabriel Houston Distinguished Professor (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/

Abstract: Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students’ knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks ~the ConMap tasks! was developed to probe the interconnections within students’ store of conceptual knowledge. The tasks have students respond spontaneously to a term or problem or topic area with a sequence of associated terms; the response terms and time-of-entry data are captured. The tasks were tried on introductory physics students, and preliminary investigations show that the tasks are capable of eliciting information about the stucture of their knowledge. Specifically, data gathered through the tasks is similar to that produced by a hand-drawn concept map task, has measures that correlate with in-class exam performance, and is sensitive to learning produced by topic coverage in class. Although the results are preliminary and only suggestive, the tasks warrant further study as student-knowledge assessment instruments and sources of experimental data for cognitive modeling efforts.

Additional Information

Publication
American Journal of Physics July 2002 70 (7), 750-758
Language: English
Date: 2002
Keywords
Association, Physics, Education, Assessment, Evaluation, Conceptual knowledge

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