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An Item Response Curves Analysis Of The Force Concept Inventory, Gary A. Morris, Nathan Harshman, Lee Branum-Martin, Eric Mazur, Taha Mzoughi, Stephen D. Baker

Faculty and Research Publications

Several years ago, we introduced the idea of item response curves (IRC), a simplistic form of item response theory (IRT), to the physics education research community as a way to examine item performance on diagnostic instruments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI). We noted that a full-blown analysis using IRT would be a next logical step, which several authors have since taken. In this paper, we show that our simple approach not only yields similar conclusions in the analysis of the performance of items on the FCI to the more sophisticated and complex IRT analyses but also permits additional …