Discussions of diagnostic tools that gauge students’ conceptual understanding permeate the literature. Many instructors report their class’ normalized gain to characterize the change in scores from pre-test to post-test. We describe a new procedure for characterizing these changes. This procedure, which we call the normalized change, , involves the ratio of the gain to the maximum possible gain or the loss to the maximum possible loss. We also advocate reporting the average of a class’ normalized changes and utilizing a particular statistical and graphical approach for comparing average values.
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