Investigating screening-target item performance at a Hispanic-serving institution

Research from cognitive psychology suggests that to reason productively, students must possess content understanding (i.e., mindware) and apply appropriate reasoning strategies. This has led researchers to develop a screening-target methodology and sequences of items designed to assess student content understanding and their reasoning consistency. Screening questions probe student conceptual understanding, while target questions require students to apply this understanding in situations that present reasoning challenges. We investigate the performance of select screening-target item sequences that have shown a high correlation between screening item performance and target item performance in previous research. We will present testing data from large enrollment introductory mechanics courses at a Hispanic-serving institution (HSI).