More than just right or wrong: Using concept questions to discern students´ thinking in mechanics

This paper outlines five concept questions from Statics and Mechanics of Materials from which instructors can easily learn about student thinking when the students select incorrect answers. These questions represent vertical transfer assessment tools and show the potential of using such questions. They can be used as part of a pre-test or in some other manner such as a warm-up exercise. The questions discussed here all show good correlation between students´ answer selections and the misconceptions or specific difficulties that they are exhibiting with the concept covered in the question. Simply by assessing the answer distributions instructors can easily learn enough about student thinking to tailor instruction and classroom activities.