Representations in physics: Construction and validation of a questionnaire for higher secondary education

Abstract

This paper report the construction of a questionnaire to investigate high school students' representations of physics concepts. The development of the instrument went through different stages of revisions and implementation among students and experts in Physics. The final version was applied to a sample of 120 high school students (Science and Humanities College, UNAM). Questionaire validity included item analysis of intelligibility, completeness, and structure equivalence. The Rasch Partial Credit Model analysis was conducted to identify the different levels of knowledge integration of students' responses. Alpha Cronbach was calculated (0.75) as a measure of reliability. Results show that the questionnaire characterizes properly the diverse types of external representations used by students-e.g. written answers, schemes, graphs and drawings. The results obtained through this kind of questionnaires can contribute to the new theoretical approaches in science education focused on representations and their dynamics of change in students' thinking.