Vazgen Shekoyan
Assistant Professor
Assessment Institute
Spring 2015
PH 101 Course Assessment Report
Overview of Course Assessment
PH 101, Principles of Physics course, is an introductory level physics course for non-science majors. The
course satisfies science with a laboratory requirement; it is also a required course for elementary
education majors at the City College. The major goal of the course is to develop students’ understanding
of physics with an emphasis on conceptual understanding.
The PI assessed students’ understanding of few selected fundamental physics topics that appear in the
course more than once and are important for deeper understanding of most parts of the course. The
assessment tool (Content Domain Assessment Tool) assesses the ability of students to apply the main
terms and concepts in simple everyday-life situations such as a person pushing a box. An additional
assessment tool was designed to assess the course outcomes in the affective domain (Affective Domain
Assessment Tool) such as students’ perceptions on how much gains they made in their understanding of
the main concepts or in their confidence that they can understand a physics course material.
The assessment was administered in three sections of the course. In total, 76 students participated in the
assessment.
Student Learning Outcomes and General Education Objectives
The assessment tools are designed to assess the following Student Learning Outcomes:
1. Use algebra to describe physical situations and to solve physical problems.
2. Describe the concepts associated with topics in physics and use them to write answers to
conceptual questions.
3. Recognize mass and inertia and solve conceptual problems using these terms.
4. State Newton’s laws of motion and use them to solve motion problems and to answer
conceptual questions.
5. Describe the concepts of weight, friction, circular motion, gravity and apply concepts to
conceptual questions.
6. Define energy, work, power and their SI units and use them to solve problems.
7. Solve problems using conservation of energy and its various forms.
The General Education Objectives that are related to the above mentioned learning outcomes are listed
below:
1. Write, read, listen and speak clearly and effectively.
2. Use analytical reasoning skills and apply logic to solve problems.
3. Use quantitative skills and mathematical reasoning to solve problems.
4. Integrate knowledge and skills in major field and across disciplines.
Description of assignments and justifications
Content Domain Assessment Tool: The Content Domain Assessment Tool is in a form of two in-class
questions with sub-questions. The assignments describe simple real-life situations and ask the solver a
series of questions. Most of the questions ask the solver to describe processes in terms of physics terms
and concepts. This format is chosen deliberately in order to avoid telling students directly which physics
terms and physical concepts are relevant for answering those questions. For example, the first question
does not state explicitly to apply Newton’s laws for finding numerical values of horizontal forces to see if
students would realize themselves that they should apply Newton’s laws to find the unknown forces
(Learning Outcome 4).
Question 1 of the assessment tool corresponds to Course Learning Outcomes 1-5. Question 2 corresponds
to Course Learning Outcomes 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7. Both questions are related to all General Education
Outcomes listed above.
Figure 1: Content domain assessment tool
Question1: While Tom pushes a 40-kg box in horizontal direction along the classroom floor with a 100 N force, the
box is moving in a straight line with constant speed. Ignore air-resistance when answering the questions below.
Explain your reasoning in detail.
a)
Write down as much information as you can about the main horizontal forces exerted on the box (their
names, directions, origins and whenever possible, their numerical values).
b)
Write down as much information as you can about the main vertical forces exerted on the box (their
names, directions, origins and whenever possible, their numerical values).
c)
What horizontal forces are exerted on Tom? Write down the names, directions and if possible, magnitudes
(numerical values) of those forces.
Question 2: Few days ago Tom’s younger brother Jim was pushing the same 40-kg box up along an incline with 80N force for about 4 seconds. The box covered 2 m distance along the incline while Jim was pushing it.
a) Write down as much information as you can about Jim’s work on the box and exerted power.
b) Describe in detail what energy transformations are happening during this process assuming that the
box is speeding up during pushing.
A thorough response to Question 1 requires students




To identify the main forces acting on the box with correct directions;
Compare their strengths using Newton’s I or II laws;
Using a simple mathematical formula to find weight (W=m*g);
Applying Newton’s III law to identify action-reaction pairs
A thorough response to Question 2 requires students




Understand when is work being done on an object
Applying a simple formula (W=F*d and P=W/t) to calculate work and power with correct units;
Identifying different forms of energies involved in the process (potential, kinetic and thermal
energies);
What energy transformations are happening in a simple process?
Figures 2 and 3 contain the rubrics the PI have created and used for assessment analysis.
Affective Domain Assessment Tool: The Affective Domain Assessment Tool is prepared in a form of a
Likert-scale survey. It was administered anonymously to elicit honest responses from students. The
survey assesses students’ beliefs related to their perceptions of their gains in knowledge, skills and level
of enthusiasm due to the course. Such an assessment is important since it determines the likelihood of
students actually applying knowledge and skills they acquired in the course in their future lives and
careers. For example, a student who has gained confidence in his/her ability of solving physics problems
is not likely to apply the concepts learnt in the physics class outside the classroom (thus negatively
affecting Learning Outcomes 1 and 2) or a student who does not understand relationships between the
main concepts would see the physics as a collection of isolated facts which will make it more likely that
he/she will forget most of what he/she has learnt shortly after the course completion.
The Affective Domain Assessment Tool is provided in the Table 1.
Figure 2: Rubric for scoring Problem 1 (3-good mastery of the topics, 2-fair mastery of the topics, 1-poor
mastery of the topics, 0-no mastery of the topics)
Figure 3: Rubric for scoring Problem 2 (3-good mastery of the topics, 2-fair mastery of the topics, 1-poor
mastery of the topics, 0-no mastery of the topics)
Table 1: Affective domain assessment tool
Q1: As a result of your work in this course, what GAINS DID YOU MAKE in your UNDERSTANDING of
each of the following?
NA
No help
A little
Somewhat
A lot
A great deal
1.1 The main concepts explored in this course
9
1
2
3
4
5
1.2 The relationships between the main concepts
9
1
2
3
4
5
1.3 How studying physics helps people address real
world issues
9
1
2
3
4
5
A lot
A great deal
Q2: As a result of your work in this course, what GAINS DID YOU MAKE in the following?
NA
Nothing A little Somewhat
2.1 Enthusiasm for the subject
9
1
2
3
4
5
2.2 Interest in discussing physics with friends or
family
9
1
2
3
4
5
2.3 Interest in taking or planning to take additional
physics courses
9
1
2
3
4
5
2.4 Confidence that you understand a physics course
material
9
1
2
3
4
5
2.5 Confidence that you can solve physics problems
9
1
2
3
4
5
2.6 Your comfort level in working with complex
ideas
9
1
2
3
4
5
Results of the content-domain assessment
Problem 1 Analysis: Identifying the presence of friction force is a very basic task, and the PI expects the
majority of students to be able to do that. As shown in Figure 4 histogram on Horizontal Forces, about
80% of students did recognize the presence of friction force. Similarly, the presence of two vertical forces
(gravitational and support forces) were identified correctly by 60% of the students (Figure 4 histogram on
Identifying Vertical Forces). The situation could be improved if instructors assign students a task often
used in the higher-level physics courses, namely, drawing force-diagrams (often called free-body
diagrams). Since course textbook has very few assignments of that nature, instructors are recommended to
either create their own tasks or provides students with physics problems from higher level textbooks and
ask PH-101 students to draw force-diagrams for those problems.
Realizing that friction force should be as great as the pushing force requires higher level of mastery since
it is related to well-known student misconception of forces in the direction of actual motion always being
bigger than forces opposing the motion. Students had to apply Newton’s I (or II) law to argue that the two
forces have to be balanced since the box is moving at a steady rate (constant velocity). Only 17% of
students recognized the equality of the two forces (Figure 4: Horizontal Forces). Only 4% percent of
students explicitly mentioned that their conclusion about the equality of the two forces was due to
Newton’s laws. Similarly, very few students argued that the two vertical forces have equal magnitude or
even tried to determine numerical values of those forces. Many students either could not do it or didn’t
attempt calculating numerical values due to general nature of the question (“determine, if possible,
numerical values…”).
Figure 4: Scoring students’ responses to Question 1 with the rubric
The third sub-question of Problem 1 asked students to identify horizontal forces acting on Tom. Direct
application of Newton’s III law should have helped students realize that since Tom is pushing the box, the
box will be pushing back on Tom. Similarly, Tom’s feet are pushing the ground backward, and thus, the
ground should be pushing him forward (friction force). The PI coded students’ responses to the third subquestion based on whether students’ realized presence of the above-mentioned two interactions. 62% of
students noted the force of box on Tom and 48% noted the presence of friction force. More practice with
identification of interactions and pair-forces could help.
Problem 2 Analysis: The first two sub-questions required calculations. 30% of students calculated the
work correctly and only 8% calculated the power correctly (Figure 5). It was expected that the power
calculation rate will be lower since it is typically not emphasized much by the instructors. For most of the
cases the failure to find the work or power correctly was conceptual rather than arithmetic.
The Energy Transformations coding results follow a bell curve. Most students were able to identify
various forms of energies involved in the process, however failed to argue the directions of
transformations (e.g., claiming that potential energy decreasing since kinetic energy is increasing).
Figure 5: Scoring students’ responses to Question 2 with the rubric
Another difficulty students might have been facing was the open-ended nature of the questions. For
instance, rather than being told to find numerical values of all the forces, the problem instructions was
asking them “to write down as much information as they can” (and “find numerical values, if possible”).
Our students are not used to such format (they mostly see multiple-choice questions or short and specific
questions). More practice with open-ended, less specified (ill-structured) problems would be beneficial
for students since most of real-life or everyday problems are of that nature.
Results of the affective domain assessment
The affective domain survey is presented in Table 1. The results of the assessment are in Table 2.
Students’ responses are treated as continuous variables (interval scale). The distribution is symmetric with
averages closer to the positive side.
Table 2: Affective domain assessment
N = 77
Average
St. Dev.
Mode
Q 1.1
3.8
0.8
4
Q 1.2
3.7
0.8
4
Q 1.3
3.9
0.9
4
Q 2.1
3.4
1.2
3
Q 2.2
3.3
1.2
3
Q 2.3
2.9
1.3
3
Q 2.4
3.3
1.0
3
Q 2.5
3.2
1.0
3
Q 2.6
3.3
1.0
3
The average for students’ perception on their gains of understanding of the different course aspects
(concepts, connections between concepts and real-life applications) is 3.8 that is closer to the “A lot”
option. Students’ enthusiasm and confidence levels were also increased with average closer to the option
of “Somewhat”. The results are overall satisfactory.
Respectfully Submitted,
Vazgen Shekoyan
Appendix: Student Artifacts