extended · article · 2014

Seeking missing pieces in science concept assessments: Reevaluating the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment through Rasch analysis

Lin Ding; Benjamin D. Wright

Discipline-based science concept assessments are powerful tools to measure learners' disciplinary core ideas. Among many such assessments, the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment (BEMA) has been broadly used to gauge student conceptions of key electricity and magnetism (E) topics in college-level introductory physics courses. Differing from typical concept inventories that focus only on one topic of a subject area, BEMA covers a broad range of topics in the electromagnetism domain. In spite of this fact, prior studies exclusively used a single aggregate score to represent individual students' overall understanding of E without explicating the construct of this assessment. Additionally, BEMA has been used to compare traditional physics courses with a reformed course entitled Matter and Interactions (M). While prior findings were in favor of M, no empirical evidence was sought to ru...