The data used in this discussion is responses from a concept inventory test, administered at the Queensland University of Technology. Concept Inventories are a form of assessment carefully crafted  to identify common misunderstandings or misconceptions in a key field. They are a set of multiple-choice questions given to students, designed to include the correct option, as well several distractors (Libarkin, 2008). The incorrect options, i.e. distractors, are designed to mimic common misconceptions of students. Ideally, this will lead to the identification, and hopefully rectification of these misconceptions.

The concept inventory used here is the Electronic Circuits Concept Evaluation (ECCE) (Thornton & Sokoloff), which, as the name suggests, tests fundamental electrical circuit knowledge. Along with the included multiple choice questions, a short response component was added for students to explain how they came to choose a particular option.

1. The data contained here is a selected subset of questions from the ECCE. Each column of data contains either written or multiple choice data relating to questions from this concept inventory. Each row is a student’s response to the test.
2. File format is Excel (.xlsx)
3. Excel is required to open this file.

Various pieces of software were used to perform analysis on this data set (8 different pieces of software). Further details are included in the publication.