Evaluating the students’ learning on the electricity and magnetism using a conceptual survey BEMA

Abstract In this work we evaluated the performance of first-year students of the College of Science and the College of Engineering at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU), Oman on the concepts of electricity and magnetism using the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment (BEMA). The BEMA pre-test and post-test were implemented at the beginning of semester and toward the end of the semester respectively. We investigated the correlation between pre-test and post-test BEMA scores to offer a deeper insight into the students’ understanding of concepts. This study also examined the gain in individual subtopics and compared the BEMA results with the students’ final course grades. The findings indicate that students perform better on questions related to electostatics, struggle more with those related to magnetostatic and have significant difficulties with Faraday’s law. Additionally, a gender-based analysis was conducted, revealing no statistical difference in performance between male and female students.