Light interference is an essential topic for understanding the wavelike nature of light, however, there are limited studies on modeling and assessing students’ misconceptions and learning difficulties in this area. Based on the knowledge integration modeling approach, a conceptual framework for light interference is developed and used to model student understanding and guide the development of an assessment tool on light interference. The conceptual framework provides a representation of students’ reasoning pathways to clearly show their connections through different conceptual components and contextual features of problem-solving settings. This type of representation focuses on showing students’ knowledge structures regarding the features of integration and fragmentation. Experts’ reasoning pathways always flow through a central idea of a concept with well-established connections to a wide range of contextual features and conditions. These connections form an integrated knowledge structure, which demonstrates deep understanding. In contrast, novices often focus on surface details without linking the central idea, forming fragmented local connections that link directly between contextual features and task outcomes. As a result, novice students’ problem solving often relies on memorization of formula and solutions without any deep understanding. Through testing and interviews at a large Chinese university, a light interference test (LIT) has been developed and validated. Assessment results also demonstrate that students with a strong conceptual understanding of the central idea are able to apply expertlike reasoning to familiar and novel questions regardless of the contextual details. Meanwhile, students with weaker or nonexistent understanding of the central idea often struggle when novel situations are presented. LIT provides a useful tool to measure students’ conceptual understanding on light interference and probe thought pathways of students’ reasoning that can further indicate students’ knowledge structure and levels of deep understanding.

Knowledge integration is essential to achieve deep conceptual understanding, which requires students to develop well-connected knowledge structures through the central idea of a concept. To effectively represent and analyze knowledge integration, a conceptual framework model on force and motion is developed to map learners’ knowledge structures in terms of how conceptual ideas and contextual conditions are connected. Two studies have been conducted. First, the misconceptions on force and motion held by Chinese middle school students are examined. Although the Chinese students had experienced extensive problem-drilling in instruction, which is notably different from that of the populations documented in the literature, their misconceptions are similar to those previously reported. This suggests that traditional problem-drilling does not substantively improve conceptual development. In addition, detailed analysis of students’ qualitative and quantitative responses also suggests that students’ misconceptions can be viewed through the conceptual framework model as local connections among subsets of contextual features, which indicate fragmented knowledge structures. The second study evaluates the effectiveness of a modified instruction that targets knowledge integration by explicitly emphasizing the learning of the central idea and making the needed connections with it. The results indicate that the modified instruction outperforms the traditional method in promoting knowledge integration.

In science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education there has been increased emphasis on teaching goals that include not only the learning of content knowledge but also the development of scientific reasoning skills. The Lawson classroom test of scientific reasoning (LCTSR) is a popular assessment instrument for scientific reasoning. Through large scale applications, however, several issues have been observed regarding the validity of the LCTSR. This paper will review the literature on the assessment of scientific reasoning and provide a detailed analysis of the current version of LCTSR in regards to its validity and measurement features. The results suggest that the LCTSR is a practical tool for assessing a unidimensional scale of scientific reasoning. The instrument has a good overall reliability for the whole test. However, inspections of individual question pairs reveal a variety of validity concerns for five of the total twelve question pairs. These five question pairs have a considerable amount of inconsistent response patterns. Qualitative analysis also indicates wide ranging question design issues. Therefore, assessment of subskills involved with the five question pairs may have less power due to their questionable validity.

Assessment instruments composed of two-tier multiple choice (TTMC) items are widely used in science education as an effective method to evaluate students’ sophisticated understanding. In practice, however, there are often concerns regarding the common scoring methods of TTMC items, which include pair scoring and individual scoring schemes. The pair-scoring method is effective in suppressing “false positives” at the cost of missing possible middle states of progression of student understanding. On the other hand, the individual scoring method captures an undistinguished middle level but is prone to rewarding guessing, which leads to “false positives”. In addition, this middle level does not discriminate the progression between knowing the result and explaining the reason, which limits the capacity of drawing meaningful implications from the assessment outcomes. To address the concerns with the current scoring methods, it is valuable to explore new scoring method(s) that can fully utilize the information measured with TTMC items. In this study, a number of scoring models are studied using Rasch analysis on data of a popular TTMC test, the Lawson classroom test of scientific reasoning (LCTSR), collected from four considerably different populations. The results show that the model fit quality of the scoring methods varies with student population and item design. In general, there is no one-fits-all solution; however, given the new information obtained in this study, a three-step process is suggested that can guide the development of new mixed scoring models tailored for a particular population and or test. The evaluation results show that the mixed models produce the most reliable model fitting and better than average goodness of fit. Furthermore, the results in this study also confirm previous studies, which suggest that it is harder to come up with a correct explanation than to just know the answer.

Formal understanding of the nature of science (NOS) has been considered to be a major contributor to nurturing students’ scientific literacy. In China, this view has been endorsed in the new standard for high school physics curriculum, which has guided the development of the new generation physics textbooks. Following the analytical framework established in the recent literature, this study evaluates the NOS representations in five textbooks approved by the Chinese Ministry of Education regarding the extent, the manner (explicit vs. implicit), the accuracy and completeness (from naïve to informed), and the overall consistency of different aspects of NOS. The results show that the representations of NOS in all five physics textbooks are far from satisfactory. The aspects of NOS are fully represented by only three textbooks. For all textbooks, the NOS representations are distributed unevenly throughout the contents, most of which are presented in a few pages of the preface and postscript chapters. Meanwhile, more than half of the aspects are represented implicitly, and the scientific method is poorly or inconsistently represented in three of the five textbooks. It is suggested that NOS needs to be represented explicitly and distributed evenly throughout a textbook in future revisions of the textbooks.

The design of the light environment plays a critical role in the interaction between people and visual objects in space. Adjusting the space’s light environment to regulate emotional experience is more practical for the observers under lighting conditions. Although lighting plays a vital role in spatial design, the effects of colored lights on individuals’ emotional experiences are still unclear. This study combined physiological signal (galvanic skin response (GSR) and electrocardiography (ECG)) measurements and subjective assessments to detect the changes in the mood states of observers under four sets of lighting conditions (green, blue, red, and yellow). At the same time, two sets of abstract and realistic images were designed to discuss the relationship between light and visual objects and their influence on individuals’ impressions. The results showed that different light colors significantly affected mood, with red light having the most substantial emotional arousal, then blue and green. In addition, GSR and ECG measurements were significantly correlated with impressions evaluation results of interest, comprehension, imagination, and feelings in subjective evaluation. Therefore, this study explores the feasibility of combining the measurement of GSR and ECG signals with subjective evaluations as an experimental method of light, mood, and impressions, which provided empirical evidence for regulating individuals’ emotional experiences.