Validity of multiple-choice digital formative assessment for assessing students’ (mis)conceptions: evidence from a mixed-methods study in algebra

Assessing students’ (mis)conceptions is a challenging task for teachers as well as for researchers. While individual assessment, for example through interviews, can provide deep insights into students’ thinking, this is very time-consuming and therefore not feasible for whole classes or even larger...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:ZDM 2024-08, Vol.56 (4), p.713-726
Main Authors: Klingbeil, Katrin, Rösken, Fabian, Barzel, Bärbel, Schacht, Florian, Stacey, Kaye, Steinle, Vicki, Thurm, Daniel
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algebra
Alphabets
Audience Response
Automation
Classroom response systems
Education
Evidence
Feedback (Response)
Formative evaluation
Instructional Effectiveness
Instructional Improvement
Learning
Learning Activities
Mathematicians
Mathematics
Mathematics Education
Mathematics Instruction
Misconceptions
Mixed methods research
Original Paper
Student Evaluation
Students
Syntax
Task analysis
Teacher Effectiveness
Teachers
Teaching
Test Items
Validity
Citations: Items that this one cites
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Assessing students’ (mis)conceptions is a challenging task for teachers as well as for researchers. While individual assessment, for example through interviews, can provide deep insights into students’ thinking, this is very time-consuming and therefore not feasible for whole classes or even larger settings. For those settings, automatically evaluated multiple-choice (MC) items could be a solution. However, it is a challenge to design those items and to adapt them for other countries in a way that they adequately reveal students’ (mis)conceptions. In this article, we investigate the question whether it is valid to use a German adaption of a multiple-choice test developed in Australia for formative assessment of the letter-as-object misconception in Germany. For this, first semi-structured interviews with five German Year 8 students were conducted, and second, 616 students were asked for short written explanations. These data were analysed with regards to the students’ (mis)conceptions and compared with their automatic online diagnosis. In general, a high concordance between online SMART test results and students’ explanations was observed, confirming that useful diagnoses of student misconceptions can be obtained from such a short well-designed MC test.
ISSN:1863-9690
1863-9704
DOI:10.1007/s11858-024-01556-0