A Study of General Education Astronomy Students’ Understandings of Cosmology. Part II. Evaluating Four Conceptual Cosmology Surveys: A Classical Test Theory Approach
A Study of General Education Astronomy Students’ Understandings of Cosmology. Part II. Evaluating Four Conceptual Cosmology Surveys: A Classical Test Theory Approach
Abstract
This is the second of five papers detailing our national study of general education astronomy students’ conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. This article begins our quantitative investigation of the data. We describe how we scored students’ responses to four conceptual cosmology surveys, and we present evidence for the inter-rater reliability of those scores. We devote the bulk of this article to a classical test theory analysis of the data. We calculate difficulties and discriminations for each item, and we compute Cronbach’s a as a measure of the reliability of the surveys. We also discuss the implications this analysis has for the validity of the surveys.
Date
01/01/2011
Citation
Wallace, C. S., Prather, E. E., & K Duncan, D. (2011). A Study of General Education Astronomy Students’ Understandings of Cosmology. Part II. Evaluating Four Conceptual Cosmology Surveys: A Classical Test Theory Approach. Astronomy Education Review, 10(1)
Center for Astronomy Education (CAE), Steward Observatory, University of Arizona | Center for Astronomy Education (CAE), Steward Observatory, University of Arizona | Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences, University of Colorado at Boulder
