Assessment of understanding physics: a case study

This is the story of a project which looked at some aspects of formal examinations in physics. It was conducted within the School of Physics by members of the Sydney University Physics Research Group, which was set up in 1992 by a group of academics with the aims of contributing to and applying scientific understandings of the processes and practices of learning and teaching physics at university level. The group adopted the view that because physics education has so many discipline-specific characteristics, research in that area is most appropriately done by physicists. A good deal of educational research looks at what students do, how they learn and what they think, as well as the external influences that affect learning. Our original purpose was to gain some understanding of students’ thinking that would enable us and our colleagues to become more effective teachers. We were thinking in terms of the well-established tradition of research and model-building about misconceptions, alternative conceptions and students’ construction of their own concepts in science (Confrey, 1990; Duit & Treagust, 1998). We chose, as our source of information, answers to an exam question on a topic of some importance in all introductory undergraduate physics courses: gravity and weight. In choosing that source of data we opened some connections to other flourishing areas of research in higher education: students’ approaches to learning and, in particular, the influences of assessment practices and students’ perceptions of the requirements of assessment (Struyven, Dochy & Janssens, 2005). Part of our project was concerned with the consequences of recycling an exam question, a topic about which we could find nothing specific in the research literature. Our investigation was originally focused on students’ reasoning and conceptions but as the project progressed we saw a need to concentrate more on what we, the teachers, were doing. Since our raw data were the answers to an exam question, the redirected focus was on what we as academics expect to find and reward in those answers.