Development of the kinetic molecular theory of liquids concept inventory: preliminary results on university students’ misconceptions
In this work we describe the development of the kinetic molecular theory of liquids (KMTL) concept inventory, as well as its use in investigating students’ conceptual understanding of the KMTL within the contexts of aggregate states, evaporation, boiling, condensation, conduction, convection, diffusion, and surface tension. We implemented think-alouds to prepare distractors for the closed-ended version of the KMTL, which was administered to two groups of respondents: non-physicists and physicists (166 students in total from the Universities of Rijeka and Split, Croatia). From the think-alouds and results of written survey research we drew conclusions about the students’ understanding of the structure of matter, thermal internal energy, entropy, temperature, and pressure. Our study not only reiterates earlier findings on students’ ideas about the KMTL, it also reveals numerous additional misconceptions that had not been reported earlier. Psychometric analyses support a formative use of the KMTL inventory. The inventory questions may be extensively used for identifying misconceptions, as well as for stimulating classroom discussions and conceptual change.