Using the Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey to investigate progression in student understanding from introductory to advanced levels

The Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey (EMCS) is a multiple-choice survey that contains conceptual problems involving a variety of energy and momentum concepts covered in a typical introductory physics course for science and engineering majors. Prior studies suggest that many concepts on the survey are challenging for introductory physics students and the average student scores after traditional lecture-based instruction are low. The research presented here investigates the progression in student understanding of the EMCS concepts including their evolution from the beginning to the end of their courses in introductory and advanced-level undergraduate physics after traditional lecture-based instruction. We find that on all EMCS questions on which less than 50% of the introductory physics students answered a question correctly after traditional instruction, less than two-thirds of the upper-level undergraduate students provided the correct response after traditional lecture-based instruction. We discuss the EMCS questions that remain challenging and the common alternate conceptions among upper-level students. The findings presented here are consistent with prior research showing that traditional instruction in upper-level courses, which typically focuses primarily on quantitative problem solving and often incentivizes the use of algorithmic approaches, is not effective in helping many students develop a functional understanding of underlying concepts.

Figure 1

Average post-test scores for upper-level and introductory-level students on each question. Data from the introductory-level students are shown in green while the upper-level data are in blue. Each question in which introductory-level students had less than 50% correct, the upper-level students did not reach two-thirds correct. The 50% correct and two-thirds correct are shown with orange dashed lines.

Figure 2

Upper-level student scores vs normalized gain. Normalized gain is calculated using both the pretest and post-test scores, so for each question, the pretest and post-test scores appear vertically stacked on the graph. The post-test scores are shown with circles and the pretest scores are shown with X’s. The two-thirds correct criterion for fair performance for upper-level students is shown with an orange dashed line.

Figure 3

Introductory-level student scores vs normalized gain. Normalized gain is calculated using both the pretest and post-test scores, so for each question, the pretest and post-test scores appear vertically stacked on the graph. The post-test scores are shown with circles and the pretest scores are shown with X’s.

Figure 4

Diagram for Q16.

Figure 5

Diagram for Q6.

Figure 6

Diagram for Q8.

Figure 7

Diagram for Q13.

Figure 8

Diagram for Q22.