Surveying Students' Conceptual Knowledge about Current Flow

Abstract

Over the last twenty years active research has been established in the area of students' conceptual understanding of physics, From the results of this research, many physics education researchers have realized that students learn very little physics in traditional classes. Also, traditionally taught courses do little to improve students' understanding of physics. There are many reasons for this but we focus onto one major point, We want to know students' conceptual understanding and the process of students' conceptual change for current flow, For a systematic study, a conceptual test problem was developed to evaluate students' coherence in current and the conceptual test was administered as a pre, post and delayed post test to determine students' conceptual change. This study was conducted for traditional instruction of 10th, 11th and 12th grade students (N = 401) in high school and of college students (N = 30) studying biology education. For the conceptual questions about current flow, the students exhibited local but not global coherence in conceptual understanding, and the students' cognitive structure was not strong.