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Institute
We describe an investigation of the heterogeneity in conceptual understanding of first-year
engineering students by using the force concept inventory (FCI) as a diagnostic tool. The
average FCI pre- and posttest results depend significantly on the type of school graduation.
Even interactive teaching methods that have proven to be more effective in learning outcome
cannot dissolve this heterogeneity within the first year of university study.
We report from an ongoing process to develop a thermal conceptual assessment that covers the essential concepts of first-year thermodynamics to be administered to engineering students. The goal is to develop a measurement instrument in order to investigate students’ pre-knowledge as well as the influence of teaching and learning settings. The assessment builds on known misconceptions and concept questions described in the literature. The original items have been modified significantly in the current version 3 of the test in order to create single-choice questions with four distracters each that address frequent misconceptions from student answers in a systematic way. The working process to create these distracters is described exemplarily.