Formative assessment of Physics by Inquiry classes

Students intending to become teachers take Physics by Inquiry courses at Ohio State (the course is open to other nonscience majors as well). We assess student perceptions of the Physics by Inquiry course using a Q-sort assessment. The assessment forces students to categorize the extent to which they think twenty-five descriptive statements characterize their laboratory class experience. They sort the statements from most to least characteristic of the course into bins of succesive size 2, 6, 9, 6, 2 (forcing a ``normal'' distribution). We describe how we can glean information about students' perceptions of the class by examining differences from the ``average'' values. We find significant differences among different classes and between students and instructors.