The task & goals

In this item, students are given a task of determining whether or not a given scenario (a will provide evidence for a claim about a magnetic field. Our goal is not that students know whether or not a circuit creates a magnetic field, but, instead, if they know that an electrically charged object (by itself) will not provide evidence for the presence of a magnetic field.

One challenge for us in writing this question is to produce a "3-d" style question that is targeting one physics concept. I'm not sure this does.

Student responses

This question is complex, in that students need to understand circuits and magnetism and in theory and (somewhat) in practice. This student has confusion about what the negative charges in the circuit represent (not a net charge, but the movement of negative charges). They do not attend to the presence of a field at all. 

Here the student is attending to the field lines in the circuit, and draws them correctly. However, they have the charged balloon moving in response, without much indication of why they think this would happen.