Concept inventories (CIs) are commonly used in pre-post instruction to study student conceptual change. For consistency in assessment interpretation, a CI’s assessment construct is desired to maintain invariance across different test times. In this study, the longitudinal measurement invariance (LMI) analysis under the confirmatory factor analysis framework was used to examine the stability of the factor structure between pre- and post-test of two commonly used CIs, i.e., the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM). A number of existing and modified models were examined in this paper. The results confirmed that all factor models of the FCI fitted well with both pre- and post-test data. For CSEM, acceptable fits were obtained with a reduced version of the CI. When reliability analysis was performed for the factors of these models, most modified models were found to be more reliable than the existing models. The modified models were further tested in LMI analysis, in which a sequence of models with increasingly restrictive parameter constraints was examined. For the FCI, LMI analysis demonstrated the existence of partial strict invariance, i.e., common factor structures, factor loadings, and item thresholds, and equally observed residual variances for all the items except items 2 and 29. For the CSEM, after excluding 10 items, a reduced version was found to hold the strict invariance criteria. These findings reveal that changes in scores of the whole FCI and the reduced CSEM can be attributed to changes in the latent constructs measured by the CIs, which confirms that these two CIs as reliable instruments to study students’ conceptual change over time in introductory physics courses.

中文翻译：

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评估力概念清单的纵向测量不变性和磁电的概念调查

概念清单（CI）通常用于岗后指导学习学生的观念变化。为了使评估解释保持一致，需要CI的评估架构以在不同测试时间之间保持不变。在这项研究中，使用验证性因子分析框架下的纵向测量不变性（LMI）分析来检验两个常用CI（即“力概念清单”（FCI））在测试前和测试后的因子结构的稳定性。和电磁学概念调查（CSEM）。本文研究了许多现有的和修改的模型。结果证实，FCI的所有因子模型都与测试前和测试后的数据非常吻合。对于CSEM，使用简化版本的CI获得了可接受的拟合。当对这些模型的因素进行可靠性分析时，发现大多数修改后的模型比现有模型更可靠。在LMI分析中进一步测试了修改后的模型，在该模型中检查了一系列具有越来越严格的参数约束的模型。对于FCI，LMI分析表明存在部分严格不变性，即共有因子结构，因子负荷和项目阈值，并且均等地观察到除第2项和第29项之外的所有其他项的残差。对于CSEM，排除了10项，发现简化版本具有严格的不变性标准。这些发现表明，整个FCI得分的变化和CSEM的降低可归因于CI测得的潜在结构的变化，