2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Early intervention is beneficial to student outcomes in any course. Determining which skills are most critical for student success may enable more rapid identification and intervention for students who require additional assistance. In this study, the authors used two assessment tools: the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM). These tests were administered in calculus-based physics courses to gauge student knowledge at entry and exit. While these tests are useful for obtaining information about student growth, they have typically not been useful as predictive tools. For this study, the authors examined specific fundamental skills assessed on these tests to determine if entrance performance on questions assessing those skills was an indicator of future performance. The authors divided questions into three categories: verbal, diagrammatic, and complex (requiring understanding of both language and image interpretation). Data from tests administered between 2017 to 2024 were analyzed to determine if any predictive relationship existed between entry and exit scores. Further, the authors assessed whether any relationships were associated with demographic variables like sex, major, and grade level. Verbal and complex pre-test scores accounted for some of the outcome on post-test scores on the FCI but were not predictive of raw or normalized gain. Diagrammatic questions did not seem to contribute to the change between pre- and post-test scores, although this may be a result of the low number of questions in that category. All three categories contributed to post-test measurements on the CSEM and accounted for some of the change seen in all three types of post-test measurements.