LAA Resources

Force Concept Inventory (FCI)

Purpose

The FCI assesses students understanding of basic concepts in Newtonian physics including one-dimensional kinematics, Newton’s laws, two-dimensional motion with constant acceleration, and vector sums.

Population

The FCI is commonly administered in introductory college mechanics courses (algebra-based and calculus-based) and high school physics courses.

Typical Performance

In our models, we have found that the FCI and the FMCE have very similar scores. The plot below contains pretest and posttest scores on the FCI and FMCE from 259 introductory physics courses that are either reported in the literature or collected with LASSO. The average effect size (Cohen’s d) is approximately 1.

Example question:

Validity

The FCI is one of the original concept inventories and the most widely used. Since its development validation standards have improved and several limitations in the FCI exist around the fairness of the questions for men and women (Dietz et al., 2012; Traxler et al., 2018).

Thornton, R., Kuhl, D., Cummings, K., & Marx, J. (2009). Comparing the force and motion conceptual evaluation and the force concept inventory. Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research, 5(1), 1–8.https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.5.010105
Semak, M. R., Dietz, R. D., Pearson, R. H., & Willis, C. W. (2017). Examining evolving performance on the Force Concept Inventory using factor analysis, 010103, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.113.010103
Henderson, C. (2002). Common Concerns About the Force Concept Inventory. The Physics Teacher, 40(9), 542. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.1534822
Planinic, M., Ivanjek, L., & Susac, A. (2010). Rasch model based analysis of the Force Concept Inventory. Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research, 6(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.6.010103
Dietz, R. D., Pearson, R. H., Semak, M. R., & Willis, C. W. (2012). Gender bias in the force concept inventory? AIP Conference Proceedings, 1413, 171–174. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3680022
Han, J., Koenig, K., Cui, L., Fritchman, J., Li, D., Sun, W., … Bao, L. (2016). Experimental validation of the half-length Force Concept Inventory. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 12(2), 020122. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.12.020122
Scott, T. F., Schumayer, D., & Gray, A. R. (2012). Exploratory factor analysis of a Force Concept Inventory data set. Physical Review Special Topics - Physics Education Research, 8(2), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.8.020105
Wang, J., & Bao, L. (2010). Analyzing force concept inventory with item response theory. American Journal of Physics, 78(10), 1064–1070. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.3443565
Traxler, A., Henderson, R., Stewart, J., Stewart, G., Papak, A., & Lindell, R. (2018). Gender Fairness within the Force Concept Inventory. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 14(1), 010103.

Research

The research conducted with the FCI is extensive. We recommend using Google Scholar and the citations listed under validation to find articles of interest.