Yesterday in class, we administered both a “mini-exam” on a small unit on “physics fundamentals” and part of a pretest on electricity and magnetism. The students also were to turn in their entrance survey” online before coming to class.
Part 1 of the EM pretesting covered concepts about basic series and parallel resistor circuits, using the DIRECT test — a diagnostic electric circuits test developed by Paula V. Engelhardt (now at Tennessee Tech University) during her graduate studies at North Carolina State University. It is a 29-question multiple choice tool.
Part 2 of the EM pretesting (to be given during the first half of class Tuesday) will be the CSEM — a conceptual survey on electricity and magnetism (a fields approach). It is a 32-question multiple choice tool.
The entrance survey is the CLASS — the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey, a 42-question Likart scale survey.
Thus far, the course is going well (based on gut instinct). I was impressed that students appeared to actually take the prestest seriously. No students appeared to finish in 5 minutes (answering questions randomly). However, I personally don’t like surveying and testing them so much in the term. I thought about reducing the number of questions in the EM pretests, but was concerned about test validity, so I did not.
I also don’t like the fact that the “physics fundamentals” section on mechanics moves so quickly. However, there’s nothing to be done about that short of REQUIRING 101 as a prerequisite, which would significantly decrease the number of students in the course. I did add one additional day on the physics fundamentals since last years course.
The conclusion is that as much as it feels good to be collecting research data, I’m looking forward to the second half of Tuesday’s class when we start to get into the true content of the course at last!