The Continuous-Time Signals and Systems Concept Inventory

Kathleen E. Wage, John R. Buck, Thad B. Welch, and Cameron H. G. Wright

Abstract
This paper describes the development of a continuous-time signals and systems concept inventory (CT SSCI) exam. The CT SSCI exam has twenty-five multiple choice questions and is designed to assess students' understanding of core concepts in undergraduate signals and systems. The questions require little or no computation, and contain distractors, or incorrect answers, that capture common student misconceptions. This paper discusses the list of concepts covered by the exam, reviews test results for the first version of the CT SSCI, and describes the question design strategy. A study to evaluate version 2.0 of the exam is underway at four campuses, and this paper reports preliminary results from that study.

© 2002 IEEE. The article (PDF) appeared in Proceedings of the 2002 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), vol. IV, pp. 4112-4115, May 2002. This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

This article is password-protected. Email John Buck (johnbuck [at] ieee.org) or Kathleen Wage (k.e.wage [at] ieee.org) to obtain the password.