CAREER: A Model for Achieving Flexible and Scalable Conceptual Assessment – A Prototype in Undergraduate Quantum Mechanics

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This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). This project aims to serve the national interest by creating a flexible and robust tool to measure student learning in undergraduate quantum mechanics courses. Such a measurement tool is important because applications of quantum mechanics within science and industry represent a growing area of potential and priority for the country. As technologies such as quantum computers are well on their way to being a reality, it will be critical that the STEM education community provides effective educational programs the produce a quantum-literate workforce that can work in these cutting-edge industries. Having a tool that can measure students’ learning of quantum mechanics concepts is a vitally important part of ensuring that these programs are effective at achieving their goals. This project also aims to provide the ability to compare the effectiveness of different quantum education courses and programs to identify efficient and innovative instructional strategies and approaches. Additionally, this new measurement tool seeks to provide a mechanism by which we can identify differential performance between different groups of students within quantum education. Differences in performance are often reflective of inequities in the educational system in which some groups are better supported than others. Identifying these inequities is the first step to changing the system to ensure that all students, regardless of their identities or backgrounds can be successful, thus supporting the goal of retaining and supporting a diverse population of students in STEM programs and careers. To accomplish the goals above, this project intends to establish and implement a new model for the design and structure of assessments in Physics Education Research (PER) through the development of a flexible coverage prototype assessment. This work is timely in that it addresses a growing need for assessments that better support the educational goals of the community, and the flexible nature of the assessment will allow for its broad adoption and facilitate positive impact on student learning on a broader scale than has previously been achieved. The proposed prototype assessment seeks to target undergraduate quantum mechanics (QM). QM represents an ideal content area to test this new assessment model because it is a foundational component of undergraduate physics programs, but also features significant variation in the content covered at different institutions. The proposed instrument - the Quantum Physics Assessment (QuPA) - will be composed of questions from existing, static QM assessments, as well as new items developed to target important topical areas of QM not already captured by the existing assessments such as quantum information. To accommodate flexible content coverage and ensure the QuPA items are unbiased, Item Response Theory (IRT) will guide the validation of the QuPA. The use of IRT to develop assessments like the QuPA, while novel in PER, is a state-of-the-art approach used in multiple other fields. Results from the QuPA will also be analyzed to identify curricular approaches which result in higher student performance relative to other approaches. Detailed documentation and dissemination of the development and validation of the QuPA to multiple STEM disciplines will provide a model allowing others to replicate this process in the development of future assessments for other content areas.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.