PE-CAP: Redesigning Legacy Conceptual Inventories: Qualitative Validity Evidence from Student Reasoning in Cognitive Interviews

The Physics Evidence-Centered Assessment Project (PE-CAP) seeks to redesign conceptual assessment instruments to better reflect contemporary frameworks of physics understanding and assessment design. This poster presents the development and refinement of items through cognitive interviews with students at multiple universities. These interviews examined how students interpreted question prompts, visual representations, and response formats. Insights from these interviews guided iterative revisions to item wording, diagrams, and response structures, as well as informed the creation of new items based on unexpected student reasoning, all aimed at improving alignment with intended constructs. The resulting instrument, a one-dimensional kinematics assessment, was subsequently administered as a pre- and post-test across multiple institutions to validate its effectiveness. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2235518.