Student-Created Physics Problems as an Independent and Equitable Assessment Tool

Abstract

Traditional high-stakes summative assessments—timed, in-class exams accounting for a large percentage of the term’s overall grade—have often received criticism from the educational community. Such assessments tend to prize a particular “narrow bundle of skills,” and have been shown in some contexts to produce disparate outcomes between different demographic groups. Alternative low-stakes assessments (assignments with significantly less impact on the overall grade) have shown potential to improve student engagement and close demographic gaps. At the same time, principles from physics education research suggest to us that students may benefit from the challenge of writing their own physics problems. Conjoining these ideas, we document an assignment (“The Problem Project”) in which students were asked to create and solve a problem of their own design, as an alternative form of assessment, and provide exploratory research into its equity impacts.