Comparison between performance on a concept inventory and solving of multifaceted problems

Engineering science courses teach students to apply fundamental principles and methods to understand and quantify new, unfamiliar situations. Prompted by the finding that students often have widespread misconceptions regarding basic principles, researchers in physics education have developed concept inventories to assess conceptual understanding. In this paper, we put forth a methodology for exploring the relation between conceptual understanding, as judged by performance on a concept inventory, and efforts to solve to typical, multifaceted problems. Based on an early version of a concept inventory for statics and a first attempt to employ this methodology, we find there indeed to be correlations between conceptual understanding and other general measures of performance on problem solving, and course success in general. However, we did not find a one-to-one correlation between an apparent understanding of specific concepts and the successful application of those concepts in problem solving.