| Title: | Changing Distracters on Questions of the Force Concept Inventory |
| Meeting: | 129th AAPT National Meeting: Sacramento, CA |
| Location: | Union Redwood |
| Date: | Wednesday, Aug. 4 |
| Time: | 10:15 a.m. |
| Author: |
N. Sanjay Rebello, Kansas
State Univ. 785-532-1539, srebello@phys.ksu.edu |
| Co-Author(s): | Dean A. Zollman |
| Abstract: | We report on a two-phase study that investigated the effect of distracters on student performance on selected Force Concept Inventory (FCI) questions. In the first phase we presented students with four FCI questions in an open-ended format. Students' open ended responses were categorized. In the second phase we reverted to a multiple-choice format, but replaced the infrequently used distracters on the original FCI questions with new distracters constructed from the open-ended response categories in the first phase. Our results indicate that changing the distracters may change the ideas that students activate and transfer into the problem. Our results also appear to imply that the effectiveness of distracters may change with student population. The original FCI was a product of careful research with a student population that may have been different from the students in our research, thereby resulting in a different set of distracters. |
| Footnotes: | None |