Analysis techniques for physics education

Lecture in English by Genaro Zavala, Physics Education and Innovation Group, Department of Physics, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico.

Abstract:

A great part of physics education research is dedicated to students' alternative conceptions so it is very important to have a good tool to assess what students think. There are many techniques that are actually very good on this like a series of very careful designed open questions in which students have to write their reasoning. Another great technique is to have an interview in which, following a protocol and being prepared, the interviewer can deeply understand student's reasoning. However, these techniques are designed for a very few number of students (the later) or for not so many students (the former). If one wants to assess students reasoning in a large scale, multiple choice questions (MCQ) constitute a tool. MCQ, as any other technique, have to be very carefully designed and they could be a great tool to understand how students think. To analyze data from MCQ there are various techniques and I am going to be talking about some not-so-known techniques: item response curves (IRC) and concentration analysis (CA). I will present what they are and what they can be applied for.