It is a truth universally acknowledged that students entering their first university-level mechanics course carry with them some physics misconceptions, e.g., that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, a moving object will eventually come to a stop, and continuous motion is achieved only through continuous force, etc. Due to the widespread prevalence of such misconceptions, a significant proportion of physics education research is dedicated to the development of diagnostic tools designed to help to identify these misconceptions. Such tools usually come in the form of carefully structured multiple-choice tests, where incorrect answers are derived specifically from flawed logic, inspired by these known misconceptions. By critically examining the answers students choose, researchers are able to surmise the dominant misconceptions plaguing students. What we did In our study, we chose to utilise the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), a 30-minute multiplechoice test comprising 30 questions on elementary principles and applications of classical mechanics. The FCI is administered to first-year students enrolled in introductory physics courses at the beginning of the academic year to evaluate their baseline comprehension of Newtonian mechanics. Students are not expected to prepare for the assessment. We performed a questionby-question analysis of the FCI responses for five first-year physics cohorts (N=337 students), to identify the most popular or ‘dominant’ misconceptions. We also carried out a preliminary analysis of the correlations between students’ Matric marks and FCI scores. Specifically, we considered the correlations between FCI scores and the Grade 12 results for (i) Physical Science, (ii) Mathematics, and (iii) English. Note that through (iii), we assessed the impact of reading comprehension on academic performance. Though it is the language of instruction and the ‘lingua franca’ in academia, a meaningful proportion of students do not speak English at home. This may place students at an unfair disadvantage. How we executed the project With the permission of the various lecturers involved in each of the participating courses (see Table 1) and ethical clearance from the University of Johannesburg (UJ) Ethics Committee, we launched the FCI test via the Blackboard interface and made it available to students for a total of five days, using the module page corresponding to each of the courses. Through this platform, we were able to track student activity (to determine whether test-takers left the browser page during the course of the test), time their test attempts, and force submission after an allotted time. We were also able to make the test visible for a set period of time. For our data collection, we enabled these features to reduce cheating and to ensure students submitted their responses after 30 minutes. Once the deployment period was over and each class had completed the assignment, the data was downloaded and processed within a single Excel spreadsheet for each of the individual classes. All data was anonymised in accordance with the requirements of the Protection of Personal Information Act. For each question of the FCI, we recorded the dominant response (i.e., the most popular answer) and compared it to the number of correct responses. We considered a concept to be well understood by the participants when the correct response was the dominant response. Teaching Innovation for the 21st Century | Showcasing UJ Teaching Innovation Projects 2022 28
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