  This paper presents a case-study assessing and analyzing student engagement
with and responses to binary, descriptive, and computational questions testing
the concepts underlying resistor networks (series and parallel combinations).
The participants of the study were undergraduate students enrolled in a
university in Pakistan. The majority of students struggled with the descriptive
question, even when successfully answering the binary and computational ones,
failed to build an expectation for the answer, and betrayed significant lack of
conceptual understanding in the process. The data collected was also used to
analyze the relative efficacy of the three questions as means of assessing
conceptual understanding. The three questions were revealed to be uncorrelated
and unlikely to be testing the same construct. The ability to answer the binary
or computational question was observed to be divorced from a deeper
understanding of the concepts involved.
