With the already widespread nature of multiple-choice assessments and the increasing popularity of answer-until-correct, it is important to have methods available for exploring the validity of these types of assessments as they are developed. This work analyzes a 20-question multiple choice assessment covering introductory undergraduate chemistry…

The Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics (SATS) is a widely used family of instruments for measuring attitude constructs in statistics education. Since the development of the SATS instruments, there has been an evolution in the understanding of validity in the field of educational measurement emphasizing validation as an on-going process. While a…

Graduate teaching assistants (TAs) may identify with multiple roles during their introductory biology teaching experiences. This study developed an instrument that measures TA role identity in introductory biology. Initial development and content validation of the Biology Teaching Assistant Role Identity Questionnaire (BTARIQ) occurred in four…

Validated conceptual multiple-choice surveys administered before and after instruction in relevant concepts can be useful tools to gauge the effectiveness of curricula and pedagogical strategies. Here we discuss the use of four different validated surveys to investigate student understanding: The Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey (EMCS), the…

This study examines Cho & Demmans Epp's short-form adaptation of Rovai's well-known Classroom Community Scale (CCS-SF) as a measure of classroom community among introductory undergraduate math and statistics students. A series of statistical analyses were conducted to investigate the validity of the CCS-SF for this new population. Data were…

In this work, the authors document an expansion of the Public Speaking Competency Rubric (PSCR). First developed in 2012 by Schreiber, et al., the original rubric has only one item related to non-verbal communication. The authors of this work expanded the rubric to include 10 items related to the non-verbal aspects of public speaking and had it…

A lack of understanding of statistics, and being unable to apply its techniques, not only has a negative impact on the pass rates of students studying introductory statistics, but also affects the potential usefulness of these students when they enter the marketplace. I report here a novel scale developed to measure various factors that may be…

We present a psychometric evaluation of a revised version of the "Cybersecurity Concept Inventory" ("CCI"), completed by 354 students from 29 colleges and universities. The CCI is a conceptual test of understanding created to enable research on instruction quality in cybersecurity education. This work extends previous expert…

The Fundamentals in Meteorology Inventory (FMI) concept inventory exam was recently developed to gauge understanding of fundamental meteorological concepts among introductory meteorology students. The exam was iteratively tested and refined over several years using a small sample of students. With a goal of evaluating the reliability and validity…

Boosting underrepresented student persistence in STEM majors has been of interest for several years. Prior research has explored various factors that may influence student success and persistence in STEM majors. Specifically, some of these studies have employed Yosso's community cultural wealth framework to explore how a student's cultural wealth…

As chemistry education, and science education more broadly, have shifted to emphasize realistic scientific practices as an important component of education, a number of researchers have used the Students' Understanding of Models in Science (SUMS) instrument to assess students' knowledge about scientific models and modelling. SUMS has also been…

We discuss the development and validation of a conceptual multiple-choice survey instrument called the survey of thermodynamic processes and first and second laws (STPFaSL) suitable for introductory physics courses. The survey instrument uses common student difficulties with these concepts as resources in that the incorrect answers to the…

We describe the construction, validation, and testing of a concept inventory for an "Introduction to Physics of Semiconductors" course offered by the department of physics to undergraduate engineering students. By design, this inventory addresses both content knowledge and the ability to interpret content via different cognitive…

The Science Motivation Questionnaire II (SMQ II) was developed to measure aspects of student motivation in college-level science courses. Items on the SMQ II are structured such that the word 'science' can be replaced with any discipline title (e.g., chemistry) to produce a discipline-specific measure of student motivation. Since its original…

Diagnostic tests for placing students into appropriate courses are commonly used in higher education math and science departments. We found no physics education research examining the validity of such exams, how well they are placing students into appropriate courses, and what guidance these exams can give for better focusing instruction. In this…