| Title: | Replacing Distracters on the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) with More |
| Meeting: | 116th AAPT National Meeting: New Orleans, LA |
| Location: | N/A |
| Date: | Monday, January 5 |
| Time: | 3:45 p.m. |
| Author: |
N. Sanjay Rebello, Kansas
State Univ. 785-532-1633, srebello@phys.ksu.edu |
| Co-Author(s): | Dean A. Zollman |
| Abstract: | In our previously reported study we compared student performance on four FCI questions with equivalent open-ended questions. Our results showed good agreement between the percentage of correct responses on both the open-ended and multiple-choice formats. However, some of the naturally arising categories of the open-ended responses did not correspond to existing FCI multiple choices, and some of the multiple-choice distracters on the standard FCI questions were not effective. Hence, we decided to replace the ineffective FCI distracters with choices constructed from the incorrect open-ended categories. Here we compare student responses on three equivalent multiple-choice formats for the same four FCI questions: (1) With the usual distracters. (2) With some distracters replaced with those constructed from the categories of the open-ended responses described above. (3) With both the standard distracters as well as those from the open-ended categories. We will also compare the reasoning that students gave for their choices in each of the three questionnaires. |
| Footnotes: | *Supported in part by the NSF under grant number ESI 945782. |