Conservation of charge to understand potential using on line charge measurements

Electric potential turns out to be one of the most difficult concepts in students’ learning: its role is not recognized either in electrokinetics or in electrostatics. In this area the transfer of charge between conductors is explained according to Coulomb’s law and looking at the same amount of an entity on them as a balancing factor. Moreover, students’ ideas often imply a lack of awareness about the conservation of charge. The inclusion of the idea of potential as a magnitude running the transfer of charge was planned in a vertical path on electrostatics using a strategy based on simple experiments. The need for repeated quantitative measurements, with good sensitivity, makes the on-line measure a determining factor

An environment to share in-service training on the net: An action-research about charge in primary and middle school

The net was one of the determining factors in a training of a Group of 4 primary and middle school teachers (L. M. in Forni Di Sopra and C. D. F. in Villa Santina, P. C. in Tolmezzo and D. S. in Gemona, all places in the mountains of Friuli, in the Nord-East of Italy) in an action-research on the electric charge. It was developed through meetings with researchers in physics education and Exchange and sharing of experiences and projects on the net, in an environment designed for teaching activities and under the guidance of a project tutor. The environment allowed to establish different kinds of relations: between teachers, between them and researchers, between classes. It offered to teachers (two in middle school and two in primary school) a place for discussions during the design of paths to be presented to their classes, to structure and share the products of their training both during and after it, to reflect on their training path

The construction of a coherent interpretation of electrostatic interactions in the context of training teachres

Several studies highlight the importance of electrostatics as regards its role of disciplinary foundation. Research on learning processes and teaching/learning proposals highlighted some important difficulties that affect knowledge also in other fields. Incoherent statements using microscopic entities with different roles and modalities in different experiences are founded in high-school and university students and are a prelude to formative deficiencies as regards teachers also on the methodological plane. They rise from a teaching approach in which the implicit assumptions are mainly on the types of reasoning leading to the identification of electrified states of the system and the ways by which these are obtained. Especially for cases where assumptions involving the microscopic world are needed it is extremely important to build in an explicit, rigorous and organic way the phenomenological elements associated to the interpretative reasoning that base these assumptions. For the importance of the basic scientific education and related teacher training a Formative Intervention Module (MIF) was carried out in which we investigate the recognition of common elements in phenomenology to build interpretative frameworks gradually wider and of more general value

Conservation of charge to understand potential using on line charge Measurements

Electric potential turns out to be one of the most difficult concepts in students\u2019 learning: its role is not recognized either in electrokinetics or in electrostatics. In this area the transfer of charge between conductors is explained according to Coulomb\u2019s law and looking at the same amount of an entity on them as a balancing factor. Moreover, students\u2019 ideas often imply a lack of awareness about the conservation of charge. The inclusion of the idea of potential as a magnitude running the transfer of charge was planned in a vertical path on electrostatics using a strategy based on simple experiments. The need for repeated quantitative measurements, with good sensitivity, makes the on-line measure a determining facto