Last spring our physics team started adding lab skill questions to a couple of our tests in 1st year Physics. We plan to add them to more of our tests this year. The goal is for students to demonstrate actual lab skills as part of the test, and use this as an avenue to assess understanding of physics in lab situations. For this test, students interacted with a Position vs. Time graph that describes the motion of two objects before and after a collision. The prompts asked students to identify information on the graph, make measurements on the graph (use the slope tool to calculate velocity) and to make a claim about a conceptual question and support this claim with data.
Randall Physics 