Dual-diagnostic approach for jointly estimating students’ conceptual understanding and misconceptions in forces and motion

Diagnosing students’ mastery of physics concepts alongside their misconceptions is important for guiding effective physics instruction. Prior studies have analyzed distractor choices to identify misconceptions, and recent research has applied cognitive diagnostic modeling to obtain more fine-grained insights into student understanding. Building on this progress, we first proposed the two-stage multiple-choice deterministic inputs, noisy “” gate with hierarchy (TS-MC-DINA-H) model, which estimates the probabilities of both conceptual mastery and misconceptions through option-level response coding. On the basis of this model, we developed a cognitive diagnostic assessment tool for forces and motion. An analysis of data from 492 high school students validated the assessment tool. Moreover, the diagnostic results revealed that students with identical total scores often exhibited different mastery-misconception profiles, thus suggesting that diagnostic information can complement traditional score-based evaluation. The key goal of this study is to provide a new approach for simultaneously diagnosing concept mastery and a wide range of misconceptions at the individual level. This dual diagnostic perspective provides a more comprehensive picture of student learning and offers practical implications for targeted instruction and personalized remediation.