PE-CAP: Redesigning Legacy Conceptual Inventories: Project overview

We provide an overview of Physics Evidence-Centered Assessment Project (PE-CAP): a large and long-term project, most recently funded by NSF award #2235518, to develop sets of valid, fair, transparent, and flexible assessments of conceptual understanding of university-level introductory physics topics. PE-CAP is intended to move beyond legacy instruments, such as the Force Concept Inventory, and use more robust and comprehensive methods to build valid and ever-improving assessments that can be productively used by educators and education researchers for a broad range of contexts and populations. In this talk, we briefly describe the big-picture ideas behind the project such as the evidence-centered design framework, physics community input and engagement, data collection from a diverse set of institutional contexts and populations, qualitative and quantitative data collection, extensive analysis on large data sets, transparency with data and arguments of validity, access and flexibility for researchers and educators, and continual improvement of items and assessment scales and subscales. Other PE-CAP talks during this AAPT conference will provide details on results from an assessment on kinematics, which is the first of the two assessments we are currently building.