Mosart tests were developed by a team of researchers in the Science Education Department of Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. These tests measure students misconceptions and their results help teachers of science frame their instruction and start from the scientific concepts that majority of students do not understand well or has misconceptions about them. They are different from regular tests in that they have questions that test the understanding of very basic concepts, intermediate and advance scientific concepts across the class. Some of the more advanced concepts in Mosart test are designed to be hard so that not even the high achieving students cannot grasp them. The average score on these tests is 50%. That is because the tests contain questions that are to be very easy and very hard. This is done in order to cover the understanding of students in the classroom, the low achieving, the intermediate and the high achieving students.
I think these tests would be very useful to me as teacher as their scores finely discriminate between students of different level of achievement. Mosart offers tests that are given prior to instruction and after the instruction. The first ones determine possible students misconceptions and also the science concepts knowledge they understand. The other ones show the understanding and misconceptions of concepts after the instruction. The difference between pre and post tests scores will show if there was any conceptual change in students understanding of science concepts I taught. It will also show me the misconceptions students will hold on even after the instructions. That would then further gave me insight which concepts I should teach more to develop students' understanding.
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