In his Phys-L post of 19 Dec 2001 19:01:10-0600 titled "Re: Concept
Inventory for EM" Brian Brian Whatcot wrote:
"I believe Richard. . .(Hake). . . is mistaken: "Force Concept
Inventory" finds 1010 hits. It is true that, by contrast, Force
Concept Inventory earns 203 thousand hits. This is an illustration of
Google's willingness to look for keywords anywhere in a text."
I apologize. As Brian indicates, my specification for the Google
search was ambiguous at best. What I wrote in my post of 19 Dec 2001
16:17:48-0800 was:
"That these concerns. . .(for the security of the FCI). . . are well
founded is indicated by the fact that a Google
<http://www.google.com/> search on 19 Dec 2001 for "Force Concept
Inventory" netted 211,000 hits in 0.24 sec. . . . ."
A relatively non-ambiguous version would have been:
"That these concerns. . .(for the security of the FCI). . . are well
founded is indicated by the fact that a Google
<http://www.google.com/> search on 19 Dec 2001 for "Force Concept
Inventory" (WITHOUT the quotes) netted 211,000 hits in 0.24 sec. . .
. ."
Even better and would have been something like this:
"That these concerns. . .(for the security of the FCI). . . are well
founded is indicated by the fact that an ADVANCED Google
<http://www.google.com/> search on 19 Dec 2001 for:
a. the EXACT PHRASE: Force Concept Inventory
b. with return pages written in English
c. returning results with any file format
d. return web pages updated anytime
e. return results where terms occur anywhere in the page
f. return results from any domain
g. no filtering (pornographic versions of the FCI are OK)
Yields 946 hits in 0.09 seconds.
The fact remains that some of the hits yield non-password protected
FCI questions - I shall forbear indicating the URL's - suggesting
that the FCI may now be well-known to many student web-surfers and
their friends. I think that research results based on present-day FCI
testing may be questionable, and that PER groups should consider
undertaking construction of a NEW EDITION of the FCI, in time for
calibration against the 1995 version (Halloun et al 1995).