About the CAPA Project

Performance assessments, which go beyond the memorization and snap responses required by multiple-choice questions, and closely resemble the challenges offered by the workplace, are widely recognized as the preferred way to assess students’ understanding and skills, particularly in technical areas.

Project Overview

Performance assessments, which go beyond the memorization and snap responses required by multiple-choice questions, and closely resemble the challenges offered by the workplace, are widely recognized as the preferred way to assess students’ understanding and skills, particularly in technical areas. They offer students problems with open-ended questions, multiple steps to a solution, and often more than one satisfactory (and no optimal) outcome. Implementation of performance assessment has been limited, however, because it is expensive, labor-intensive, and subjective. By using simulated circuits and test equipment, we believe that our software will offer the same advantages as typical performance-based assessments at a fraction of the cost, while also providing a more objective outcome on which to base decisions. We hope that this project will lay the groundwork for large-scale implementation of performance assessment in technical high schools and two-year colleges around the nation. We would like to thank the National Science Foundation for supporting this project. National Instruments, Inc. has kindly donated several copies of their LabView product, which we have used to produce the oscilloscope assessment items. Finally, we thank the Physics Education Technology group at the University of Colorado for giving us access to their open source Java application, the Circuit Construction Kit, which we adapted to create our multimeter assessment items.

CAPA Assessments

We have six assessments that are currently available to the public--additional assessments are still in development. The first two are basic digital multimeter assessments that are targeted for use at technical high schools--Using a Multimeter and Measuring Resistance. These two assessments were designed to shed light not only on whether the students know how to set up the multimeter and make measurements, but also on their understanding of Ohm’s Law. Measuring Resistance requires the students to measure an unknown resistance using only a simulated battery, wires, and a multimeter. Our software tracks and analyzes student work and interprets student actions to provide a formative assessment for the teacher, as well as feedback to the students themselves.

The next two assessments analyze students understanding of an oscilloscope. Created with LabVIEW, these assessments test students knowledge of measuring frequency and amplitude. The more advanced assessment focuses on Amplitude Modulation.

The third set of assessments focus on Circuit Troubleshooting. In the first Digital assessment, students are shown a circuit schematic and are asked to complete the corresponding truth table. Then, given a pictorial representation of the circuit, students use a virtual probe to locate the faulty component. Our software not only reports on student success in finding faults but also assesses the strategy used to solve the problem. Two analog circuit troubleshooting assessments are also available.

Contact Us

If you have any questions, or are interested in participating in our research, please send email to capa at concord.org.