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1.1 Force Concept Inventory (FCI)

[A] Authors

David Hestenes, Malcolm Wells, and Gregg Swackhamer
Arizona State University Department of Physics, P.O. Box 871504, Tempe, AZ, USA

hestenes@asu.edu

[B] Summary and format

The FCI is a test of conceputal understanding of Newtonian mechanics, developed from the late 1980s. It consists of 30 MCQ questions with 5 answer choices for each question and tests student understanding of conceptual understanding of velocity, acceleration and force. Many distracters in the test items embody commonsense beliefs about the nature of force and its effect on motion.

The FCI has been administered to tens if not hundreds of thousands of Physics students worldwide, at school and university level. It is widely held as the ’gold standard’ conceptual inventory in the Physical Sciences. The relatively poor improvement of his students at Harvard after a semester of traditional physics instruction led Eric Mazur to develop the Peer Instruction methodology. This YouTube video documents that process.

[C] Citation

D. Hestenes, M. Wells, G. Swackhamer
Force Concept Inventory
The Physics Teacher, 30, 141-158 (1992).

[D] How to obtain

The instrument can be obtained online

[E] Relevant literature

This link takes you to a Google Scholar search for literature associated with this concept inventory.

Google Scholar citation for the FCI