Students' Understanding of Direct Current Resistive Electrical Circuits

Research has shown that both high school and university students' reasoning patterns regarding direct current resistive electric circuits often differ from the currently accepted explanations. At present, there are no standard diagnostic examinations in electric circuits. Two versions of a diagnostic instrument called Determining and Interpreting Resistive Electric circuits Concepts Tests (DIRECT) were developed, each consisting of 29 questions. The information provided by the exam provides classroom instructors a means with which to evaluate the progress and conceptual difficulties of their students and their instructional methods. It can be used to evaluate curricular packages and/or other supplemental materials for their effectiveness in overcoming students' conceptual difficulties. The analyses indicate that students, especially females, tend to hold multiple misconceptions, even after instruction. During interviews, the idea that the battery is a constant source of current was used most often in answering the questions. Students tended to focus on current in solving the problems and to confuse terms, often assigning the properties of current to voltage and/or resistance. Results indicated that students do not have a clear understanding of the underlying mechanisms of electric circuit phenomena. On the other hand, students were able to translate easily from a "realistic" representation of a circuit to the corresponding schematic diagram.Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in the American Journal of Physics - Physics Education Research Supplement. No known publication date as ye

SciTech News Volume 71, No. 2 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division 9 Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 12 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 14 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 16 Advertisements IEEE

Teaching Memory Circuit Elements via Experiment-Based Learning

The class of memory circuit elements which comprises memristive, memcapacitive, and meminductive systems, is gaining considerable attention in a broad range of disciplines. This is due to the enormous flexibility these elements provide in solving diverse problems in analog/neuromorphic and digital/quantum computation; the possibility to use them in an integrated computing-memory paradigm, massively-parallel solution of different optimization problems, learning, neural networks, etc. The time is therefore ripe to introduce these elements to the next generation of physicists and engineers with appropriate teaching tools that can be easily implemented in undergraduate teaching laboratories. In this paper, we suggest the use of easy-to-build emulators to provide a hands-on experience for the students to learn the fundamental properties and realize several applications of these memelements. We provide explicit examples of problems that could be tackled with these emulators that range in difficulty from the demonstration of the basic properties of memristive, memcapacitive, and meminductive systems to logic/computation and cross-bar memory. The emulators can be built from off-the-shelf components, with a total cost of a few tens of dollars, thus providing a relatively inexpensive platform for the implementation of these exercises in the classroom. We anticipate that this experiment-based learning can be easily adopted and expanded by the instructors with many more case studies.Comment: IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine (in press

San Luis Obispo Children\u27s Museum: The Circuit Lab

Executive Summary Over a nine month period, the senior project team worked closely with the San Luis Obispo Children’s Museum to develop a new interactive exhibit for the museum’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) floor. The initial budget given for this project was $3,000. The museum’s requirements for a new exhibit were that it must be safe for young children to use, require minimal supervision, is interactive, has learning objectives, and is economically feasible and sustainable. The team chose to build an exhibit that would teach young children about simple circuitry and electronics. First, extensive research of circuits, children’s museums, children\u27s safety laws and practices, attention span of the relevant age group of children, and existing solutions was completed in order to build a strong background on the topic. An observational time study was also done at the SLO Children’s Museum to gather more information about the end user. Next, a conceptual model of the exhibit was formed. Through an iterative design process, the team developed multiple functional prototypes and conducted electronic testing to reach a final design. The exhibit is made up of three interactive stations that each teaches a unique concept. The stations include an interface that requires user input to cause a response. The first station teaches how different resistance affects a circuit, namely, Ohm’s Law. At this station, the user compares the effect a big resistor and a small resistor would have on a circuit involving an LED fan. The second station teaches the concept of completing a circuit in order to function correctly. Here, the user builds a circuit using childproofed custom pieces that will, if done correctly, illuminate an electroluminescent (EL) wire that is outlined in the shape of a volcano. The third station teaches the idea of electronics and circuits being a part of everyday life. This station is a plexi-glass display that includes everyday devices opened up to show their internal circuitry and wiring. In addition, the team also worked with the museum to construct effective and simplified signage that would instruct the user on how to interact with the exhibit. The exhibit is scheduled to be open by July of 2015. Furthermore, in order for the exhibit to be maintained, the team has built numerous, interchangeable spare parts and have given design specifications and a build manual to the museum to refer to. Ultimately, the team was successful in staying within the budget by only spending$388.62 overall

Augmented Reality Technology in Teaching about Physics: A systematic review of opportunities and challenges

The use of augmented reality (AR) allows for the integration of digital information onto our perception of the physical world. In this article, we present a comprehensive review of previously published literature on the implementation of augmented reality in physics education, at the school and the university level. Our review includes an analysis of 96 papers from the Scopus and Eric databases, all of which were published between January 1st, 2012 and January 1st, 2023. We evaluated how AR has been used for facilitating learning about physics. Potential AR-based learning activities for different physics topics have been summarized and opportunities, as well as challenges associated with AR-based learning of physics have been reported. It has been shown that AR technologies may facilitate physics learning by: providing complementary visualizations, optimizing cognitive load, allowing for haptic learning, reducing task completion time and promoting collaborative inquiry. The potential disadvantages of using AR in physics teaching are mainly related to the shortcomings of software and hardware technologies (e.g., camera freeze, visualization delay) and extraneous cognitive load (e.g., paying more attention to secondary details than to constructing target knowledge)

Research-oriented training for Italian teachers involved in the European MOSEM Project

A study on the specific knots of electromagnetic induction and superconductivity for in-service teachers has been carried out within the PCK theoretical framework (Shulman L. S., Educ. Res., 15 (1986) 4). The main knots listed in the literature were the object of an analysis in terms of teachers’ pedagogic behaviour in planning intervention work to overcome the learning problems and organizing class activities

Integrated Testlets and the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique

The increased use of multiple-choice (MC) questions in introductory-level physics final exams is largely hindered by reservations about its ability to test the broad cognitive domain that is routinely accessed with typical constructed-response (CR) questions. Thus, there is a need to explore ways in which MC questions can be utilized pedagogically more like CR questions while maintaining their attendant procedural advantages. we describe how an answer-until-correct MC response format allows for the construction of multiple-choice examinations designed to operate much as a hybrid between standard MC and CR testing. With this tool - the immediate feedback assessment technique (IF-AT) - students gain complete knowledge of the correct answer for each question during the examination, and can use such information for solving subsequent test items. This feature allows for the creation of a new type of context-dependent item sets; the "integrated testlet". In an integrated testlet certain items are purposefully inter-dependent and are thus presented in a particular order. Such integrated testlets represent a proxy of typical CR questions, but with a straightforward and uniform marking scheme that also allows for granting partial credit for proximal knowledge. We present a case study of an IF-AT-scored midterm and final examination for an introductory physics course, and discuss specific testlets with varying degrees of integration. In total, the items are found to allow for excellent discrimination, with a mean item-total correlation measure for the combined 45 items of the two examinations of $\bar{r}'=0.41\pm 0.13$ (mean $\pm$ standard deviation) and a final examination test reliability of $\alpha=0.82$ ($n=25$ items). Furthermore, partial credit is shown to be allocated in a discriminating and valid manner in these examinations.Comment: 13 pages. 7 figures. Accepted to the American Journal of Physics (August 2013