Assessing Physics Competence in Teaching Dynamics: A Survey of Upper Secondary Teachers and Students in Northern Mountainous Provinces of Vietnam

This study describes current practices of assessing physics competence in the Dynamics chapter of Grade 10 Physics in order to inform the design of an assessment toolkit. Data were collected through two questionnaires from 34 teachers and 233 upper secondary students, mostly in Lao Cai province, and were analysed with descriptive statistics. Cronbach’s α of the scales ranged from 0.913 to 0.983. Teachers used paper-based assessment tools (M = 3.89) more often than process-oriented tools (M = 3.20), and rubrics and peer assessment were used least. Teachers rated their understanding of the structure of physics competence as fairly good (M = 3.63), while 47.1% correctly identified all three competence components. Students reported lower frequencies than teachers for written tests, context-based tasks and experiments, and 49.1% of students named experimental inquiry as the task group assessed least often. Of the teachers, 82.4% considered a chapter-specific assessment toolkit necessary, provided that training is conducted on the chapter content itself and that record-keeping time is reduced. The findings suggest that the toolkit should include content-specific behavioural indicators, experimental tasks with rubrics, and criterion-referenced feedback templates.