High School Students' Understandings and Representations of the Electric Field

TL;DR

This study explores Chinese high school students' pre-instruction ideas about electric fields through creative activities, revealing variable reasoning and productive common sense resources that differ from traditional fixed conceptions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel open-ended comic strip activity to uncover students' spontaneous ideas about electric fields before instruction.

Findings

Students' reasoning about electric fields is more variable than previously thought.

Students leverage common sense ideas that can be productive for learning.

Pre-instruction ideas include diverse and context-dependent representations.

Abstract

This study investigates the representations and understandings of electric fields expressed by Chinese high school students 15 to 16 years old who have not received high school level physics instruction. The physics education research literature has reported students conceptions of electric fields post-instruction as indicated by students performance on textbook-style questions. It has, however, inadequately captured student ideas expressed in other situations yet informative to educational research. In this study, we explore students ideas of electric fields pre-instruction as shown by students representations produced in open-ended activities. 92 participant students completed a worksheet that involved drawing comic strips about electric charges as characters of a cartoon series. Three students who had spontaneously produced arrow diagrams were interviewed individually after class. We identified nine ideas related to electric fields that these three students spontaneously leveraged in the comic strip activity. In this paper, we describe in detail each idea and its situated context. As most research in the literature has understood students as having relatively fixed conceptions and mostly identified divergences in those conceptions from canonical targets, this study shows students reasoning to be more variable in particular moments, and that variability includes common sense resources that can be productive for learning about electric fields.