The Dynamics Concept Inventory Assessment Test: A Progress Report And Some Results

Abstract

Concept inventories are excellent instruments with which to validate the effectiveness of new teaching methodologies and curricular innovations. At the 2003 ASEE Annual Conference, we revealed that we were developing a Dynamics Concept Inventory (DCI) test and we presented our progress toward the creation of this test. Since that time, we have made substantial progress toward a release version of the DCI. In this paper, we will present the results of administering the DCI to over 450 students at a large public university and at a small private university and we will describe the final steps we have taken in getting to version 1.0 (the first public release) of the test. Introduction: What is the DCI and Why are We Creating It Concept inventories are an invaluable tool for the assessment of student learning and curricular innovations. Student misconceptions are not random, but are generally the result of a deficiency in their understanding of fundamental principles. The source of these misunderstandings, as identified by Clement [1] and others (see, for example references [2–7]), can be traced to deeply-seated preconceptions that make the complete understanding of fundamental principles very difficult. In order to create a new conceptual framework and to displace the existing one that has been ingrained over many years, new teaching methodologies have to be established. Concept inventories are an excellent instrument with which to validate the effectiveness of these new methodologies. At the 2003 ASEE Annual Conference, we revealed that we were developing a Dynamics Concept Inventory (DCI) test and we presented our progress toward the creation of this test [8]. In that paper, we described those concepts that were perceived by dynamics instructors to cause problems for students. Since that time, the authors have done extensive testing of the DCI and have completed its first public release (in January 2005). The body of research knowledge on student learning of Newtonian mechanics, including both kinematics and kinetics, has become quite rich in the last 15 years, but, because of its newness, this knowledge generally remains unfamiliar to most instructors whether their academic home is in a physics department or an engineering department. Interestingly, it is Proceedings of the 2005 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright © 2005, American Society for Engineering Education not unusual for authors of papers on the teaching of mechanics in engineering education to refer to the history of how the teaching of the subject developed over the centuries since Newton and Euler published their general laws of motion (for a recent example, see Kraige [9]). However, this rich research literature on student learning of dynamics has yet to significantly influence either the presentation of the subject in textbooks or the emphasis and pedagogy used in the classroom. For the most part, the teaching of dynamics continues to be patterned after how instructors were taught when they were students, rather than being informed by research on learning. We believe that we are on the verge of seeing vast improvements in how much and how well students learn in this subject—we present this work with the hope that we can assist and even hasten this improvement.