{"id":518,"date":"2019-04-16T22:45:45","date_gmt":"2019-04-16T22:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fs-s-wpmu-03.facsci.ualberta.ca\/scilift\/?p=518"},"modified":"2019-04-16T22:45:45","modified_gmt":"2019-04-16T22:45:45","slug":"concept-inventories-physics-inventory-of-critical-thinking-pict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaces.facsci.ualberta.ca\/scilift\/2019\/04\/16\/concept-inventories-physics-inventory-of-critical-thinking-pict\/","title":{"rendered":"Concept Inventories: Physics Inventory of Critical Thinking (PICT)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interview validation of the Physics Lab Inventory of Critical Thinking<\/a><\/p>\n

K. N. Quinn, C. Wieman, and N. G. Holmes<\/p>\n

Stanford University<\/p>\n

https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/1802.02424.pdf<\/a><\/p>\n

Recent work in physics undergraduate education examines the benefits of various teaching styles.\u00a0 In order to do this, there must be a measurable effect on student outcomes.\u00a0 Performing well on a course test is a familiar metric, often equated with student understanding.\u00a0 However, course tests often must be created quickly and tend to test recognition and recall.\u00a0 Although much more time-consuming, it is possible to create a concept inventory, a standardized test that determines specific incorrect lines of reasoning and is statistically validated.\u00a0 The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is a famous example in physics (Hestenes, Wells, and Swackhamer, 1992<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Quinn et al. are developing a measurement tool called the Physics Lab Inventory of Critical thinking (PLIC) to assess students\u2019 critical thinking.\u00a0 The authors define critical thinking as the ability to identify whether conclusions are supported by evidence, and to distinguish significant effects from random noise (Holmes, Wieman, and Bonn, 2015<\/a>).\u00a0 They note that although critical thinking is not physics-specific, it is often context-dependent and so should be tested in a discipline-specific way.<\/p>\n

Their paper gives an overview of the creation process for the concept inventory.\u00a0 First, the scope and topics of the assessment are established.\u00a0 Next, open-response questions on those topics are created and answered by students.\u00a0 These answers are used to determine probable misconceptions about the topic, and the corresponding student responses.\u00a0 This allows the creation of relevant distractors for multiple-choice questions.<\/p>\n

The test is then revised and calibrated.\u00a0 Students are interviewed to uncover the reasoning behind their responses.\u00a0 Answers may be added, deleted, or reworded to make them more discriminatory.\u00a0 Next, questions are calibrated for difficulty by comparing to true experts, to see what they would choose.\u00a0 These interviews, revisions, and retesting may be iterated to improve test sensitivity and reliability.<\/p>\n

In the case of the PLIC, the authors test students\u2019 critical thinking by asking for possible actions in response to a poor lab experiment outcome.\u00a0 Students followed three main behaviours.\u00a0 One was to do as much as they could, relatively aimlessly.\u00a0 Another would be to select actions that were described using familiar keywords and phrases, whether they were relevant or not.\u00a0 The third would be to weigh options critically and prioritize them.\u00a0 Interestingly, as the response options became more restricted or presentation of the question became less familiar, the first two groups would shift into more discerning behaviour.<\/p>\n

Once the authors create a scoring scheme based on the answers given by experts, they plan to create a final version of the PLIC for widespread distribution and use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interview validation of the Physics Lab Inventory of Critical Thinking K. N. Quinn, C. Wieman, and N. G. Holmes Stanford University https:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/1802.02424.pdf Recent work in physics undergraduate education examines the benefits of various teaching styles.\u00a0 In order to do this, there must be a measurable effect on student outcomes.\u00a0 Performing well on a course test<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-instructional-design","category-learning-and-teaching","category-scholarship-of-teaching-and-learning-sotl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaces.facsci.ualberta.ca\/scilift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaces.facsci.ualberta.ca\/scilift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaces.facsci.ualberta.ca\/scilift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaces.facsci.ualberta.ca\/scilift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaces.facsci.ualberta.ca\/scilift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=518"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaces.facsci.ualberta.ca\/scilift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":519,"href":"https:\/\/spaces.facsci.ualberta.ca\/scilift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/518\/revisions\/519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaces.facsci.ualberta.ca\/scilift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaces.facsci.ualberta.ca\/scilift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaces.facsci.ualberta.ca\/scilift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}