Development, Validation, and Initial Outcomes of a Research-Based Assessment Instrument Probing Students’ Proficiency with Measurement Uncertainty

Physics education research in undergraduate laboratory courses is vital to ensure that these courses, which often require extensive resources, achieve their learning goals. These courses often provide students with valuable skills and knowledge not covered elsewhere in the physics curriculum, such as hands-on technical skills. The concepts and practices around measurement uncertainty are especially important and are frequently taught only in lab courses. These skills are valuable to students both for their own work and interpreting others’ work. In this dissertation, I cover my role in developing a research-based assessment instrument called the Survey of Physics Reasoning on Uncertainty Concepts in Experiments (SPRUCE) aimed at examining student proficiencies and challenges with measurement uncertainty along 10 different axes, such as propagating errors, correct use of significant figures, estimating the size of uncertainty by considering instrument precision, and determining if two measurements with uncertainty agree with one another.

I then describe the creation of a novel scoring scheme using assessment objectives to score assessment items, which provides more information to instructors about the areas where students excel and those where students struggle. I also provide details of the validation of SPRUCE using classical test theory to present evidence for validity and reliability of the assessment instrument. Finally, I analyze preliminary results from SPRUCE, including a deeper dive into one specific set of questions addressing students’ abilities with comparing measurements, as well as a broader look at the entirety of SPRUCE and how major and gender correlate with student performance.

This dissertation also describes my work towards creating a classification scheme, or taxonomy, of undergraduate laboratory courses globally. This scheme can be useful in providing more relevant information to instructors, as they can more easily compare their courses with other similar courses. Further, this information can be used by physics education researchers in identifying which types of courses their research applies to. While the taxonomy is not yet complete, this disserta-tion covers the development of the survey, including interviews with instructors in 22 countries, and preliminary results from the survey, which involves a landscape of undergraduate lab courses based on 217 courses in 41 countries worldwide.

Overall, the work presented here can help future physics education researchers delve more into undergraduate lab courses to help bolster these and ensure they achieve their goals.