• Open Access

Development and validation of a conceptual survey instrument to evaluate senior high school students’ understanding of electrostatics

Shuaishuai Mi, Jianqiang Ye, Yan Li, and Hualin Bi
Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 19, 010114 – Published 28 February 2023

Abstract

This study developed and validated an instrument to investigate senior school students’ understanding of electrostatics and provide a cognitive diagnostic assessment of their strengths and weaknesses on the related concepts (e.g., electric charge). The instrument included 20 four-tier multiple-choice items and the development process is organized around two activities: the development of the instrument and its validation. The development step defined the secondary concepts and designed the items using the misconceptions related to them. In the validation step, the instrument was applied to 1850 senior high school students from nine schools in two provinces in China, and the collected data were analyzed using the CDM package in R language. This step ensures that the diagnostic reports represent students’ conceptual understanding reliably and validly by selecting the best model, analyzing item quality, overall test reliability, and the instrument’s structure. The instrument can provide the percentage of students in the test population who possess certain combinations of concepts, the percentage of students in the test population possessing individual concepts, and the fine-grained size of concept proficiency information, which can be integrated as one completed report to issue to students, teachers, and parents to demonstrate students’ status of conceptual understanding related to electrostatics. In addition, the construct induced from the diagnostic results can also be aggregated to the classroom, schools for instruction planning or low-stakes decision making, or infer a learning sequence.

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  • Received 26 January 2022
  • Revised 27 June 2022
  • Accepted 14 December 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.19.010114

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

  1. Professional Topics
Physics Education Research

Authors & Affiliations

Shuaishuai Mi

  • School of Physics and Electronics, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, Shandong 250358, China

Jianqiang Ye

  • College of Chemistry and Materials Engineering, Wenzhou University, Zhejiang 325035, China

Yan Li

  • School of Education and Psychological Science, University of Jinan, Jinan, Shandong 250024, China

Hualin Bi*

  • College of Chemistry, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, Shandong 250014, China

  • *Corresponding author. bihualin@sdnu.edu.cn

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Issue

Vol. 19, Iss. 1 — January - June 2023

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