Abstract
Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments may provide information about what faculty and/or researchers think it means to know and do physics, i.e. their epistemologies. Using data from students completing assessment questions during one-on-one think aloud interviews, we explore how assessment features impact (or did not impact) student engagement with the assessment problems. We analyze video recordings and transcripts to infer the epistemological framings and resources students use while completing introductory-level physics problems. Students' framings tended to be fairly stable, but when shifts did occur - they were triggered by a shift in resource, which can be activated by assessment feature. This work extends existing work on epistemological framing into the realm of assessment and allows us to consider the effects of assessments on our students' understanding of physics teaching and learning.
Highlights
As physics educators at undergraduate institutions, we are all aware of the importance of assessment in our classes
Our independent coding of frames by behaviors and resources by utterance allows us to look for local coherences of resources within and across frames identified by other researchers [54]
We argue that the intervention at the level of epistemic form is what caused Luke to shift from a conceptual physics to an algorithmic physics frame, and a new set of resources
Summary
As physics educators at undergraduate institutions, we are all aware of the importance of assessment in our classes. Individual assessments help us and our students understand whether students learned the content and skills we painstakingly taught them. We assume that how a student performs on assessments throughout the semester helps us evaluate and track student progress. Students in introductory physics frequently take multiple, high-stakes assessments or exams each semester along with weekly homework assignments and lab reports. Assessment occurs often and in a variety of ways. Consider a common assessment item on introductory physics exams—a numerical problem that requires calculation to solve.
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