Why You Should Measure Your Students' Reasoning Ability

Abstract

Many teachers administer a force concept test such as the Force Concept Inventory1,2 (FCI) to their students in an effort to evaluate and improve their instructional practices. It has been commonly assumed that looking at class normalized gains allows teachers to compare their courses with other courses. In this paper we present evidence to suggest that the use of class normalized gains alone may not provide a complete picture. We argue that student reasoning ability should also be assessed before between-course comparisons can be made. Assessment of reasoning ability is also useful in identifying students who are at risk. In the following we shall concentrate on the FCI, but we think our conclusions probably apply to physics concept tests generally.

Prospective Physics Teachers' Consistency and Scientific Reasoning in the Learning of Force Concept

“…It is important to the attention of teachers, specifically for middle and high school teacher, to identify student's scientific reasoning before instruction. In addition, identifying students' reasoning patterns is very helpful to diagnose the students who experienced more difficulty in understanding the concept, as well as a good indicator of how effective the learning that has been done in class [3].…”

“…Previous research has indeed been reported that scientific reasoning [1][2][3][4] and representational consistency [5] are factors that affect students' understanding, but these reports have not provided a comprehensive explanation of how the relationship between the two factors. The existing report like Nieminens' report [5] is limited in that it only provides the correlation coefficient between the reasoning and representational consistency prescores associated with an explanation of the correlation of each factor with single student normalized FCI gain.…”

“…A large body of research focuses on aspects of students' understanding, including the influencing factors. The researchers found among these factors are the scientific reasoning and representational consistency [1][2][3][4][5].…”

“…Researchers showed a significant correlation between the single student normalized Force Concept Inventory (FCI) gain and students' scientific reasoning prescore at several universities in the U.S. [1][2][3].…”

“…Those thinking patterns included in the formal thinking patterns, while for concrete thinking patterns consist of class inclusion (C1), conservation (C2) and serial ordering (C3). The identification of the student reasoning pattern is very useful to know the students who experienced difficulty in understanding the concept and assess how effective of learning that has been done in class [3].…”