A Comparative Analysis of Mathematics’ CI Testing on High School and Engineering Bachelor’s Students in Albania

The use of Concept Inventory tests for analysing students’ achievement and performance on understanding sciences has progressed last years in our academic and didactic mediums. Interesting and significant findings through those analysis have revealed the importance of deeper CI analysis and improvement of knowledge measuring instruments on our education communities. Based on this idea in this work we have discussed perceived features and characteristics of general Calculus concept inventory, and their significance regarding understanding physics and learning progress on this discipline. By measuring and analysing standard CI test indexes we can diagnose issues and shortcomings in conceptual understanding in physics. We evidenced an undesirable level of physics understanding not only in raw scores of the conceptual inventories, but also in the ability of students to correctly understand the physical context of problem. First evidence regarding these issues settles that students inherit shortcomings on conceptual knowledge from their undergraduate studies, and the gain on this indicator are relative to the initial conceptual knowledge. Consequently, we conclude that much effort should be made on improving conceptual knowledge during high school studies. To explore the cause factors of this indication we have proposed a factorial analysis, and preliminary findings support this assessment.