EXPLORING THE ROLE OF SELF-RELATED BELIEFS ON CONFIDENCEBASED SCORING IN FOUR-TIER MISCONCEPTION TESTS

Date

2026-7-30

Author

Taşdemir, Kübra

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Identification of students’ misconceptions is fundamental to effective science instruction and conceptual change. Four-tier diagnostic tests are widely used because they included confidence judgments to distinguish misconceptions from lack of knowledge. However, this approach assumes that confidence primarily reflects certainty about conceptual understanding, although it may also reflect students’ self-beliefs and prior achievement. This raises questions about the construct validity of confidence-based misconception assessment. This study examined whether force and motion self-efficacy, physics self-concept, general self-efficacy, and prior physics achievement predicted the discrepancy between confidence-independent misconception scores, based on answer and reasoning accuracy, and confidence-based misconception scores, which additionally incorporated confidence judgments. Data were collected from 784 undergraduates at a state university in Ankara. Structural equation modeling (SEM) tested the proposed relationships, and multigroup SEM examined whether they differed between genders. The model explained 43.7% of the variance in the score discrepancy. Force and motion self-efficacy was the strongest predictor, followed by prior physics achievement and physics self-concept, whereas general self-efficacy was not significant. The overall model was largely consistent across genders. Force and motion self-efficacy and prior achievement predicted the discrepancy in both groups, whereas physics self-concept was significant only among female students. These findings indicate that confidence-based scoring reflects not only conceptual understanding but also students’ self-beliefs and prior achievement. Thus, confidence judgments introduce systematic information beyond students’ conceptual responses into misconception diagnosis. The findings provide new evidence concerning the construct validity of confidence-based scoring and have implications for interpreting and developing diagnostic instruments that incorporate confidence judgments.

Subject Keywords

Physics Education, Misconceptions, Four-tier Diagnostic Tests, Self-related Beliefs, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM)

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/120580

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis