Improving Student Understanding of Coulomb's Law and Gauss's Law

TL;DR

This paper presents the development and assessment of five research-based tutorials aimed at improving students' understanding of Coulomb's Law and Gauss's Law in calculus-based physics courses, demonstrating their effectiveness through pre/post-tests.

Contribution

It introduces five new tutorials on Coulomb's Law and Gauss's Law and evaluates their impact on student learning in introductory physics courses.

Findings

Students showed improved scores after tutorials

Tutorial users outperformed non-users on tests

Tutorials enhanced conceptual understanding

Abstract

We discuss the development and evaluation of five research-based tutorials on Coulomb's law, superposition, symmetry and Gauss's Law to help students in the calculus-based introductory physics courses learn these concepts. We discuss the performance of students on the pre-/post-tests given before and after the tutorials in three calculus-based introductory physics courses. We also discuss the performance of students who used the tutorials and those who did not use it on a multiple-choice test which employs concepts covered in the tutorials.