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arXiv · 2504.07885

Self-Evaluated Expertise in experimental physics: a measure of students' physics self-recognition

Michael F. J. Fox·Taylor O. Pomfret
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Abstract

We introduce and theoretically justify a new measure of the self-recognition component of student physics identity called Self-Evaluated Expertise (SEE). This measure is constructed such that it can be extracted from existing responses to the E-CLASS. In this work, we compare scores from SEE with the traditional measure calculated from the E-CLASS, which probes student views about experimental physics, to show that the SEE score is a quantitatively different measure. Consequently, we show that student self-recognition decreases from pre-instruction administration of the E-CLASS to the post-instruction administration when averaged across data from 494 courses having taken place between 2016--2019.

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Michael F. J. Fox, Taylor O. Pomfret. 2025-04-10. Self-Evaluated Expertise in experimental physics: a measure of students' physics self-recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07885

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