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