Developing an instrument to examine students' analogical modeling competence: An example of electricity

Abstract

Science education reforms advocate modeling as a core practice in which analogy is a significant form and analogical modeling is a creative process for scientific explanation and discovery. This study adopts the self‐generated analogical modeling approach involving electricity, which considers all the modeling subprocesses and includes two subtopics (circuits and energy) with incompatible ontological presuppositions as a conceptual space to develop an analogical modeling competence (AMC) instrument. Two constructs, phenomenon‐related abductive premises (Phenomenon‐AbPr) and analogical modeling processes (AMP), that describe the increasing sophistication of students' AMC (i.e., Level 0 experience to Level 4 high‐order relation) are considered. The procedures utilize a construct‐based approach of developing an assessment to validate the underlying constructs and subtopics to develop the mapping between the target and the analogical models, design items, and determine outcome spaces. Data were collected from 294 Grade 6 students to examine their AMC. The item response theory technique based on the Rasch partial credit model was used to validate the two‐phase model. Student results revealed that the infit and outfit mean square values were between 0.75 and 1.33, indicating acceptable item fit. Results revealed that students scored highest on the open series circuit and lowest on electric energy in the Phenomenon‐AbPr phase. Most students demonstrated relational mapping in the analogical model validation (Level 3) stage, which performed best in the AMP phase. However, they struggled to transfer factors during the analogical model application and deployment (Level 0). Implications for science assessment and teaching are discussed.