written by Pablo Barniol, Esmeralda Campos, and Genaro Zavala

The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism is an assessment tool widely used in the Physics Education Research community. Although it has been some time since its publication, there is no study to evaluate the test by analyzing its items in detail. This contribution aims to do that by performing three item-focused statistical tests: difficulty index, discrimination index, and point biserial coefficient. We use data from an American public university and a Mexican private university. We analyze two items (14 & 20) with the most critical index values in both populations. In both items we found that the main problematic aspect is that the required reasoning process to answer them is quite elaborate, and in item 14 we also found some misleading features of the wording and the figure. The results and discussion may be useful for researchers using the test as an assessment tool and for a possible future version of the test.

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Last Modified December 26, 2016

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