AMTA Members

Evaluation instruments, their passwords and answer keys for a given content area can be found in the eWebLife Resources directory for that subject area; e.g., the FCI and MBT can be found in Physics, the ABCC and MCI can be found in Chemistry, etc.

It is important that you do not make any of these tests available on a non-secured website or allow students to keep copies of them.  It takes years to design and validate a reliable instrument to assess student understanding; this effort will be wasted once students are able to locate them. Follow this link for guidelines for administering these instruments electronically.

Non AMTA Members

Authorized educators can access the following instruments from the links below, once they have the required password.

FCI – Force Concept Inventory

The revised Force Concept Inventory (I. Halloun, R.R. Hake, E.P. Mosca, and D. Hestenes) is available (as a .pdf file) at this site to authorized educators. AMTA members can access the password at the bottom of the page. Visitors can obtain the password at https://www.physport.org/assessments/ 

You must agree to keep the test and password secure, as described in the document you will receive. If you plan to use the test with middle school or early high school students, please indicate this.

Link to download FCI in various languages.

Articles about the FCI

• D. Hestenes, M. Wells, and G. Swackhamer, Force Concept Inventory from The Physics Teacher. Download Revised Table I and/or Revised Table-II from Hestenes’s 1992 article on FCI.
• D. Hestenes and I. Halloun, Interpreting the FCI. The Physics Teacher 33, 502-506 (1995)
• I. Halloun and D. Hestenes, Search for Coherence in FCI data
• D. Hestenes, Who Needs Physics Education Research?, Am. J. Phys. 66: 465-467 (1998)
• D. Hestenes, Notes for a Modeling Theory of Science, Cognition and Instruction (2006). Pages 16-22 are very important in explaining why the FCI is so successful in assessing student concept understanding.

MBT-Mechanics Baseline Test

The Mechanics Baseline test should be compared with the Force Concept Inventory. The Baseline is the next step above the Inventory in mechanics understanding. Questions on the Inventory were designed to be meaningful to students without formal training in mechanics and to elicit their preconceptions about the subject. In contrast, the Baseline emphasizes concepts that cannot be grasped without formal knowledge about mechanics. The two tests are complementary probes for understanding of the most basic Newtonian concepts. Together they give a fairly complete profile of this understanding.

Obtain the passwords at https://www.physport.org/assessments/.

You must agree to keep the test and password secure, as described in the document you will receive. If you plan to use the test with middle school or early high school students, please indicate this.

Link to download the MBT in various languages

Article describing MBT

• D. Hestenes and M. Wells, A Mechanics Baseline Test, The Physics Teacher 30: 159-165 (1992).

TUG-K2

This is a version of Bob Beichner’s Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics adapted for use with high school students.  Visitors should use their school e-mail address to request the password from Larry Dukerich including their school name and location.

ABCC and MCI for Chemistry

Since 2001 Modeling Chemistry teachers have been working on the design of evaluation instruments. The first of these was the Matter Concept Inventory. The current version (MCI-v5) was a start, but was judged to be better suited for a 9th grade physical science course than for high school chemistry. Visitors should use their school e-mail address to request the password from Larry Dukerich including their school name and location.

In 2008 we decided to use Doug Mulford’s Chemical Concepts Inventory (CCI), originally designed for use in a first-year college chemistry course. We supplemented the test with 6 questions dealing with energy and temperature, because these concepts were a central part of the modeling chemistry curriculum. After an analysis of test results, we eliminated some items, added others and changed the name of the test to the Assessment of Basic Chemistry Concepts (ABCC). The test has undergone several revisions based on preliminary item analysis and teacher feedback. Version 2.6 was made available in July 2010.  After a more formal evaluation process in Summer 2012 (including think-aloud interviews with students) version 3.1 became available. AMTA members can download a zipped archive containing the ABCC, a spreadsheet for performing an item analysis and a document describing the changes from v2.6 (see below). Visitors should use their school e-mail address to request this archive from Larry Dukerich.

Other Instruments

A wide variety of instruments to assess student understanding in mechanics, electricity & magnetism, energy, thermodynamics, light & optics, astronomy, quantum mechanics and more can be found at the Assessment Instrument Information Page at North Carolina State University.

Lawson’s Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (CTSR)  For the password to open it, e-mail jane.jackson@asu.edu