High school students’ representations and understandings of electric fields

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 postinstruction 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 preinstruction 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.

Figure 1

Electric field lines presented to students in Tornkvist et al.’s study (1993). Left: The error finding task. Right: Two examples of the tasks administered during the interview.

Figure 2

Screenshots of the Electric Field Hockey game. Left: The Practice setting. Right: Difficulty 1 setting.

Figure 3

Reproduced screenshots of students playing the Electric Field Hockey game. Top left: Students’ strategy for the Practice Level. Top right: Result of students’ strategy. Bottom left: Students’ successful strategy for Level 1. Bottom right: Result of students’ strategy.