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A Lab Skills Diagnostic Test, John Zwart

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The American Association of Physics Teachers recommends that physics majors have proficiency in the following lab skills: constructing knowledge, modeling, designing experiments, analyzing and visualizing data, and communicating physics. I have developed a brief multiple-choice questionnaire to assess incoming students’ lab skill level in these areas. It was administered as both a pre-test and post-test for the first semester of introductory calculus-based physics. Preliminary results indicate that little improvement on the skills tested occurs without explicit instruction.