How do students' conceptual understandings correlate with their achievement on a traditional physics examination

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between students' conceptual understandings and their achievement on a traditional standardized multiple-choice examination in physics. The additional factors of gender, reasoning level, and mathematics ability, and their effects on the above relationship were also studied.;Students participating in the study were from four different introductory levels of physics: high school physics, college-level physical science, college-level noncalculus-based physics and college-level calculus-based physics. Each participating student was required to complete four instruments.;The instrument used to measure conceptual understanding was developed specifically for this investigation. A review jury of eight physics educators reviewed and rated items that had been developed for the conceptual understanding instrument. Fifteen of the highest rated items were selected for the conceptual test. Each item included a demonstration followed by a question to which students were asked to respond by selecting an answer from a provided list and then to explain their answers.;The results of the study showed that cause and effect would be difficult to predict because of the strong intercorrelation between the measured variables. A multiple regression procedure which included all independent variables was found to produce a model which significantly predicted achievement on the traditional multiple-choice examination. When variables were individually removed from the full model, only measured conceptual understanding and mathematics ability significantly reduced the predictive ability of the model. The removal of conceptual understanding produced the greatest decrease in the model. A stepwise linear regression procedure found that conceptual understanding and mathematics ability produced the most significant reduced model. Reasoning level was found to be significantly correlated to both measured conceptual understanding and performance on the multiple-choice test. A backward elimination regression procedure using conceptual understanding and reasoning level to predict performance on the multiple-choice test found that reasoning level did have a significant unique contribution. It was found that gender did not produce a significant unique contribution.;The results indicated that students' measured conceptual understanding correlated well with performance on the standardized multiple-choice physics test.