True–false or multiple-choice tests can be useful instruments for evaluating student progress. We examine strategies for planning objective tests which serve to test the material covered in science (physics) courses. We also examine strategies for writing questions for tests within a test blueprint. The statistical basis for judging the quality of test items are discussed. Reliability, difficulty, and discrimination indices are defined and examples presented. Our recommendation are rather easily put into practice.
There is evidence that a confluence of pressures to change the current physics syllabus is building from many sources. Texts for science and engineering students do not usually have much contemporary physics content. There is a need to update textbooks to include areas of current interest in physics research, to include important facets of 20th-century physics that have gone virtually unnoticed in the present generation of physics textbooks. The consequence of additions of topics must be restructuring of the physics curriculum and may lead to corresponding deletions among topics presently discussed.
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