  The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a
multiple-choice survey that contains a variety of electricity and magnetism
concepts from Coulomb's law to Faraday's law at the level of introductory
physics used to help inform instructors of student mastery of those concepts.
Prior studies suggest that many concepts on the survey are challenging for
introductory physics students and the average student scores after traditional
instruction are low. The research presented here investigates the progression
in student understanding on the CSEM. We compare the performance of students in
introductory and advanced level physics courses to understand the evolution of
student understanding of concepts covered in the CSEM after traditional
lecture-based instruction. We find that on all CSEM questions on which less
than 50% of the introductory physics students answered a question correctly
after instruction, less than two thirds of the upper-level undergraduate
students provided the correct response after traditional instruction. We also
analyzed the CSEM data from graduate students for benchmarking purposes. We
discuss the CSEM questions that remain challenging and the common alternative
conceptions among upper-level students. The findings presented here at least
partly point to the fact that traditional instruction in upper-level courses
which typically focuses primarily on quantitative problem solving and
incentivizes use of algorithmic approaches is not effective for helping
students develop a solid understanding of these concepts. However, it is
important for helping students integrate conceptual and quantitative aspects of
learning in order to build a robust knowledge structure of basic concepts in
electricity and magnetism.
