Methodological suggestions for creating subquestions for the Force Concept Inventory (and other research-based assessments)

Abstract

The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is a research-based assessment that is used internationally to assess student understanding of Newtonian mechanics. The assessment has been investigated from a number of perspectives and many suggestions have been made for its improvement. One suggestion is the creation of subquestions. Subquestions are a tool to reduce false positives (answering a survey item correctly without correct understanding) and false negatives (answering incorrectly despite correct understanding). In this presentation, we will discuss how we created subquestions for two items on the FCI, informed by survey-based interviews with students and the original intended targets of the items. Our research aims are not only to present the subquestions we developed, but to share our methodology of creating these subquestions, as this methodology can be used in general for producing subquestions on other research-based assessments as well.