engleski

An investigation of students' understanding of electromagnetic induction

Electromagnetic induction is an important, yet complex, physics topic that is a part of Croatian high school curriculum. In order to investigate students’ understanding of the topic this project was developed as a two step research. The qualitative part of the research included nine Croatian high school students of different abilities in physics to be interviewed using six demonstration experiments from electromagnetism (three of them concerned the topic of electromagnetic induction). Students were asked to observe, describe and explain the experiments. The analysis of students’ explanations indicated the existence of many conceptual and reasoning difficulties with the basic concepts of electromagnetism and especially with recognizing and explaining the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction. Three student mental models of electromagnetic induction formed during the interviews, which reoccurred among students are described. The second part of the project, the quantitative research, was based on the uncovered difficulties students had with electromagnetic induction. Using the results of the interviews, a questionnaire was designed and administered to 541 high school students in Croatia (aged 16-17) after they had learned about electromagnetic induction in their physics class. The questionnaire consisted of 8 main open-ended questions with some of them having multiple-choice parts and sub questions. In the first step of the analysis, we used Rasch modelling to analyse the functioning of the questionnaire. The Rasch analysis showed that the functioning of the questionnaire was satisfactory and produced reliable scale of linear measures of item difficulties. The standard frequency analysis and Rasch analysis pointed to several student difficulties with electromagnetic induction. These difficulties were compared to the difficulties identified through preliminary interviews, discussed, and analyzed in the knowledge-in-pieces framework.

high school, electromagnetic induction, physics education research

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