Prospective teachers' difficulties in interpreting elementary phenomena of electrostatic interactions: indicators of the status of their intuitive ideas

摘要

Student teachers were tested before and after a teaching unit on electrostatic interactions in anattempt to consider their intuitive ideas and concept development. A study was made ofstudent's explanations of basic interactions: those between two charged bodies, and thosebetween a charged body and a neutral body. Two indicators of the cognitive status of theexplanations were investigated: 'context dependence' and 'certainty or confidence index'.This allowed cognitive comparisons to be established between the explanations of differentelectrostatic interactions, and between the degrees of difficulty they represent for satisfactoryconceptual evolution. The greatest difficulties were found with explanations of thephenomena of electrostatic induction. The sample consisted of 52 students of primary schoolteacher education that participated in a teaching unit designed to overcome these obstacles.