Self-Evaluated Expertise in experimental physics: a measure of students' physics self-recognition

Abstract

We introduce and theoretically justify a new measure of the self-recognition component of student physics identity called Self-Evaluated Expertise (SEE). This measure is constructed such that it can be extracted from existing responses to the E-CLASS. In this work, we compare scores from SEE with the traditional measure calculated from the E-CLASS, which probes student views about experimental physics, to show that the SEE score is a quantitatively different measure. Consequently, we show that student self-recognition decreases from pre-instruction administration of the E-CLASS to the post-instruction administration when averaged across data from 494 courses having taken place between 2016--2019.