Abstract
Aiming at a deep understanding of some basic concepts of electric circuits in lower secondary schools, this work introduces an analogy between the behavior of children playing in a school yard with a central lake, subject to different conditions, rules, and stimuli, and Drude’s free electron model of metals. Using this analogy from the first school contacts with electric phenomena, one can promote students’ understanding of concepts such as electric current, the role of generators, potential difference effects, energy transfer, open and closed circuits, resistances, and their combinations in series and parallel. One believes that through this analogy well-known previous misconceptions of young students about electric circuit behaviors can be overcome. Furthermore, students’ understanding will enable them to predict, and justify with self-constructed arguments, the behavior of different elementary circuits. The students’ predictions can be verified—as a challenge of self-produced understanding schemes—using laboratory experiments. At a preliminary stage, our previsions were confirmed through a pilot study with three classrooms of 9th level Portuguese students.1 MoreReceived 14 November 2013DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.10.020118This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical Society
Highlights
If one wants students to learn how to use physics models to understand nature’s behavior, someone has to teach them those models [1]
In this work we propose an alternative approach, bridged by the use of an analogy we believe will develop correct understanding of simple electric circuits by 9th level students
Our research questions are the following: (1) Is it possible to develop one analogy adequate to the development of students’ understanding of the different abstract concepts used by scientists to describe the behavior of simple electric circuits? (2) Is the use of this analogy effective to correct well-known students’ misconceptions about electric circuits’ behavior? (3) Will the use of this analogy, together with the requirement for producing justifications for answers, enhance students’ problem solving capacities applied to electric circuits? At the end of this work we analyze the results of a pilot study on the pedagogical efficacy of the proposed analogy, using three classrooms of 9th level students, two experimental and a control one
Summary
If one wants students to learn how to use physics models to understand nature’s behavior, someone has to teach them those models [1]. In this work we propose an alternative approach, bridged by the use of an analogy we believe will develop correct understanding of simple electric circuits by 9th level students This approach allows students to attribute meaning to the scientific concepts used; to be able to reason based on the acquired perceptions; to develop adequate understanding enabling them to predict from fundamentals different circuits’ behavior, which they can subsequently check experimentally, discussing the observed results. Through this alternative approach students can face learning of electric circuits through a simultaneous “hands on” and “minds on” strategy. Our research questions are the following: (1) Is it possible to develop one analogy adequate to the development of students’ understanding of the different abstract concepts used by scientists to describe the behavior of simple electric circuits? (2) Is the use of this analogy effective to correct well-known students’ misconceptions about electric circuits’ behavior? (3) Will the use of this analogy, together with the requirement for producing justifications for answers, enhance students’ problem solving capacities applied to electric circuits? At the end of this work we analyze the results of a pilot study on the pedagogical efficacy of the proposed analogy, using three classrooms of 9th level students, two experimental and a control one
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