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Self-Evaluated Expertise in experimental physics: a measure of students' physics self-recognition

Physics Education 2025-04-11 v1

Abstract

We introduce and theoretically justify a new measure of the self-recognition component of student physics identity called Self-Evaluated Expertise (SEE). This measure is constructed such that it can be extracted from existing responses to the E-CLASS. In this work, we compare scores from SEE with the traditional measure calculated from the E-CLASS, which probes student views about experimental physics, to show that the SEE score is a quantitatively different measure. Consequently, we show that student self-recognition decreases from pre-instruction administration of the E-CLASS to the post-instruction administration when averaged across data from 494 courses having taken place between 2016--2019.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.07885,
  title  = {Self-Evaluated Expertise in experimental physics: a measure of students' physics self-recognition},
  author = {Michael F. J. Fox and Taylor O. Pomfret},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.07885},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

14 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables