Students from the traditionally taught classes and the CPS classes completed a series of written assessments to evaluate their understanding of physics concepts and their problem solving skills (see Supplemental Material [33] for sample items from the assessments). There were five different tests administered to assess different aspects of the students' understanding, which we briefly explain here.
Three of the tests (problem solving, conceptual questions, and categorization) examined important aspects of what might be learned from CPS, another test examined whether there was any influence on a different complex skill (finding errors), and the final test examined students' understanding of the variables in the final equation (equa-tion instantiation). Examples of each of the tests are provided in the Supplemental Material [33] and should be examined when reading these explanations. We return to these assessments again in the results section.