The Development of Constructed Response Astronomy Assessment Items

Concept inventories comprised of multiple choice questions are widely used in physics and astronomy to measure students pre-instruction knowledge and post instruction gains (Hestenes, Wells, & Swackhamer, 1992; Maloney, OKuma, Hieggelke, & Van Heuvelen, 2001, and others). Concept inventories are valuable because they address big ideas in the discipline with which students often struggle. The multiple choice construction of these instruments, however imposes structural limitations on the number and nature of misconceptions and mixed conceptual models which may be presented as item distractors (Smith & Tanner, 2010). Constructed response questions provide one means of addressing these limitations. In the effort to develop constructed response questions in the field of astronomy, we have adapted items from well-known concept inventories. These items are comprised of two, three-question sets. By adapting items from existing concept inventories the resulting items are targeted as a supplement to the original instrument, providing an additional perspective with a deeper view on student thinking of the relevant items. In this work we discuss the selection and adaption multiple choice items as part of the new question design of the AACR Question Development Cycle (appropriate reference), the testing of the resulting items, and a summary of patterns in student thinking that appeared in the body of collected responses.