21,893 research outputs found
Integrated Testlets and the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique
The increased use of multiple-choice (MC) questions in introductory-level
physics final exams is largely hindered by reservations about its ability to
test the broad cognitive domain that is routinely accessed with typical
constructed-response (CR) questions. Thus, there is a need to explore ways in
which MC questions can be utilized pedagogically more like CR questions while
maintaining their attendant procedural advantages. we describe how an
answer-until-correct MC response format allows for the construction of
multiple-choice examinations designed to operate much as a hybrid between
standard MC and CR testing. With this tool - the immediate feedback assessment
technique (IF-AT) - students gain complete knowledge of the correct answer for
each question during the examination, and can use such information for solving
subsequent test items. This feature allows for the creation of a new type of
context-dependent item sets; the "integrated testlet". In an integrated testlet
certain items are purposefully inter-dependent and are thus presented in a
particular order. Such integrated testlets represent a proxy of typical CR
questions, but with a straightforward and uniform marking scheme that also
allows for granting partial credit for proximal knowledge. We present a case
study of an IF-AT-scored midterm and final examination for an introductory
physics course, and discuss specific testlets with varying degrees of
integration. In total, the items are found to allow for excellent
discrimination, with a mean item-total correlation measure for the combined 45
items of the two examinations of (mean standard
deviation) and a final examination test reliability of (
items). Furthermore, partial credit is shown to be allocated in a
discriminating and valid manner in these examinations.Comment: 13 pages. 7 figures. Accepted to the American Journal of Physics
(August 2013
History and scientific practice in the construction of an adequate philosophy of science: revisiting a Whewell/Mill debate
William Whewell raised a series of objections concerning John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of science which suggested that Mill’s views were not properly informed by the history of science or by adequate reflection on scientific practices. The aim of this paper is to revisit and evaluate this incisive Whewellian criticism of Mill’s views by assessing Mill’s account of Michael Faraday’s discovery of electrical induction. The historical evidence demonstrates that Mill’s reconstruction is an inadequate reconstruction of this historical episode and the scientific practices Faraday employed. But a study of Faraday’s research also raises some questions about Whewell’s characterization of this discovery. Thus, this example provides an opportunity to reconsider the debate between Whewell and Mill concerning the role of the sciences in the development of an adequate philosophy of scientific methodology.Keywords: Inductivism; Experiment; Theory; Methodology; Electromagnetism
Deformation spaces of Kleinian surface groups are not locally connected
For any closed surface of genus , we show that the deformation
space of marked hyperbolic 3-manifolds homotopy equivalent to , , is not locally connected. This proves a conjecture of Bromberg who
recently proved that the space of Kleinian punctured torus groups is not
locally connected. Playing an essential role in our proof is a new version of
the filling theorem that is based on the theory of cone-manifold deformations
developed by Hodgson, Kerckhoff, and Bromberg
- …