Best Practices for Administering Attitudes and Beliefs Surveys in Physics

Abstract

Physics faculty care about their students learning physics content. In addition, they usually hope that their students will learn some deeper lessons about thinking critically and scientifically. They hope that as a result of taking a physics class, students will come to appreciate physics as a coherent and logical method of understanding the world, and recognize that they can use reason and experimentation to figure things out about the world. Physics education researchers have created several surveys to assess one important aspect of thinking like a physicist: what students believe that learning physics is all about. In this article, we introduce attitudes and beliefs surveys and give advice on how to choose, administer, and score them in your classes. This article is a companion to “Best Practices for Administering Concept Inventories,” which introduces and answers common questions around concept inventories, which are research-based assessments of physics content topics.