Force Concept Inventory Results for Year 1

This year I gave my students a physics exam called the Force Concept Inventory (available here). The idea is to give this Newtonian Mechanics test at the beginning of the year before anything has been taught, and then again after you've finished Newtonian Mechanics as a way to measure student progress, effective teaching, growth as a teacher over the scale of years.

This is the first year I'd ever given this test, so I didn't expect high results, especially considering we didn't cover centripetal motion at all. Something else to note is that I did not actually give the test at the beginning of the year, I gave it just before we covered "force", so the point gain is artificially low. I just tallied the results yesterday, and had some rather interesting discoveries.

For my classical physics class students gained about 3.5 points (out of 30), I only had one student regress, and I had 2 or 3 receive the same score. Those students who remained the same or regressed were mostly in the same class and I would normally consider them "bright" students, however they were singularly difficult students for me to connect with. Bright, but unfortunately apathetic, or perhaps "too cool" for my class. And now we have the proof that it, indeed, did nothing for them.

My Experimental Physics Class was a different story however. I only had six students who were enrolled in both the first and second semesters and took both tests, and un-expectedly, four of these students made no gains at all. It was shocking and hubling to find that 2/3 of the student population hadn't apparently "learned" any physics over the year. Shocking. The student with the highest gains jumped 6 points and another moved up 3 points, which averaged out to 1.5 pts/person, but what this tells me is that either I'm not getting through to them, or they're not prepared to take this sort of assessment. Or both. Curious, curious.