Research on the effects of a history-based curriculum on the students' understanding of the concepts of electric field and lines of force.

摘要

The difficulties in learning the concepts of electric field and lines of force that have been signaled by the research in science education constitute the starting point of this research. Among the learning difficulties that students have, the assignment of the wrong ontological status to the to be learned concepts has proven to be a main one. Given that many students fail to achieve the scientific understanding of these concepts after a traditional instruction, this research was set out to design research-based instructional material and test its influence on the ontology assigned by the students to these concepts. The instructional material was designed using examples taken from the history of physics so that an ontological analysis of the early scientists' ideas was used to help students understand the ontology of the early conceptions compared to the ontology of the modern scientific ones. The instructional material was tested with a group physics major students at an Argentinean university.; The predicates used by the students to describe an entity were taken as evidence of their ontological commitments with respect to field and lines of force. Differences in the proportion of correct predicates versus wrong ones were measured between two groups (experimental and control). These differences were detected using a quantitative measure taken from written data and were confirmed through oral interviews with some students. Although the wrong characterization of the learned entities was not absolutely eradicated from the students, a better characterization of them was present within the experimental ones.; It was also found that the ontological understanding of a concept is not related to the success in solving traditional end-of-chapter problems. This result confirms that there is a part of the physics discipline that we are leaving aside when testing is limited to the ability to solve this type of problems.