Concept inventories are valuable tools for understanding the deeply held physical misconceptions that can undermine a student's ability to succeed in engineering mechanics classes. As students move from statics onto dynamics, persistent misconceptions in rotational kinematics can become serious learning barriers. The use of a rotational kinematics concept inventory at the start of a dynamics class can inform instruction to improve students' grasp of the material.

A peer-reviewed, validated assessment tool for measuring students' conceptual understanding of rotational kinematics is provided for teachers' use by PhysPort, a website maintained by the American Association of Physics Teachers and supported by the National Science Foundation. This assessment tool was used as a pre-test for more than 100 students in a second-year engineering dynamics class at a mid-sized public university in the United States. Although average measures for the entire test fell within acceptable ranges, the measures for individual questions did not meet accepted thresholds for validation. Fourteen of the 39 questions did not yield an acceptable value of the discrimination index, and eight questions did not meet the accepted minimum for reliability as measured by the point biserial correlation coefficient. Casual conversations with students who took the pre-test indicated that some of their incorrect answers were a function of confusion around nomenclature and graphics used on the test, not a function of lack of knowledge, faulty reasoning or misconceptions.