Misconceptions in electricity at university level: development of an overcoming teaching strategy

Abstract

This communication deals with misconceptions in the cognitive structure of 2nd-year engineering students at university level, especially in Circuit Theory. An examination analysis of almost 800 students’ examination scripts confirmed that these students are prone to misconceptions. Moreover, it revealed the latter are rarely, if ever, addressed by the literature: students also seem to experience a lack of electrical circuit solving strategy, which we propose to express via “methodological misconceptions”. This diagnostic phase allowed us to develop a framework describing the misconceptions in terms of “domain of validity”, and to formalize the cognitive rupture process via simple models and representations. According to this framework, a misconception is not due to the use of an intrinsically false knowledge, but to a mismatch between the model used to understand real phenomena or to solve a problem, and the domain of validity associated by the student to this model. Based on this framework, we improved our teaching strategy: to help a student overcoming a misconception, the teaching sequence must lead him to raise doubts as to the limits of validity he associates to a model. This cognitive conflict will help the student to shrink the domain of validity of his initial model, while searching for a new more powerful model. This “shrinking operation” appears in our framework as the very nature of the cognitive rupture. This strategy has been implemented in two alternative exercises sessions. To compare the teaching efficiency of these sessions with the reference ones, students were separated into two groups (each following one session type) and a pre-/post-test assessment procedure was adopted. According to the results obtained by inferential statistics, we recommend applying this misconception counter-attack strategy in other physics fields.
Keywords: Misconception, Teaching strategy, Circuit Theory

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MISCONCEPTIONS IN ELECTRICITY AT UNIVERSITY LEVEL:
DEVELOPMENT OF AN OVERCOMING TEACHING STRATEGY
Raoul Sommeillier¹ and Frédéric Robert2
1,2Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Brussels, Belgium
This communication deals with misconceptions in the cognitive structure of 2nd-year engineering students at
university level, especially in Circuit Theory. An examination analysis of almost 800 students’ examination
scripts confirmed that these students are prone to misconceptions. Moreover, it revealed the latter are
rarely, if ever, addressed by the literature: students also seem to experience a lack of electrical circuit
solving strategy, which we propose to express via “methodological misconceptions”. This diagnostic phase
allowed us to develop a framework describing the misconceptions in terms of “domain of validity”, and to
formalize the cognitive rupture process via simple models and representations. According to this framework,
a misconception is not due to the use of an intrinsically false knowledge, but to a mismatch between the
model used to understand real phenomena or to solve a problem, and the domain of validity associated by
the student to this model. Based on this framework, we improved our teaching strategy: to help a student
overcoming a misconception, the teaching sequence must lead him to raise doubts as to the limits of validity
he associates to a model. This cognitive conflict will help the student to shrink the domain of validity of his
initial model, while searching for a new more powerful model. This “shrinking operation” appears in our
framework as the very nature of the cognitive rupture. This strategy has been implemented in two alternative
exercises sessions. To compare the teaching efficiency of these sessions with the reference ones, students
were separated into two groups (each following one session type) and a pre-/post-test assessment procedure
was adopted. According to the results obtained by inferential statistics, we recommend applying this
misconception counter-attack strategy in other physics fields.
Keywords: Misconception, Teaching strategy, Circuit Theory
INTRODUCTION
Today, it is widely acknowledged in the literature that students come to courses with misconceptions at both
pre-university and university level, in particular in physics education (Bull et al., 2010; Closset, 1992;
Hammer, 1996; Michelet et al., 2007; Turgut et al., 2011). Many authors define misconceptions as stable
cognitive structures leading to learning impediments for students, and point out the difficulty to efficiently
deal with them in class (Hammer, 1996; Küçüközer & Kocakülah, 2007; Michelet et al., 2007; Peşman &
Eryılmaz, 2010; Turgut et al., 2011). We investigated the origins, the consequences, and the diagnostic and
handling methods of this phenomenon within the context of a Circuit Theory course for 2nd year engineering
students at the university level. Our motivation comes from a twofold observation: the repetition of
unexpected mistakes from students in examinations and the scarcity of published researches we found at
university level for this specific field. To address the problem, two fundamental hypotheses were made. The
first one stated that the 2nd-year engineering students made mistakes in electricity partly on account of
misconceptions they experience in that field. In this case, the second hypothesis stated that it is possible to
conceive an efficient misconception counter-attack strategy. The assessment of the first assumption was
realized by the analysis of past examinations. For the second assumption, the relevance and the efficiency of
the developed strategy was carefully assessed via post-tests and inferential statistics.
A FRAMEWORK FOR MISCONCEPTION AND ITS OVERCOMING
A first step was to define clearly what a “misconception” is. The literature presents some divergences in this
aim. It is worth to note that we choose the term “misconception” as it is the most commonly used in the

literature
1
. We propose an original framework illustrated in Figure 1. The key point that we introduce is to
consider knowledge as the combination of two elements: one model and one domain of validity. The
common sense and many authors appeal to the concept of knowledge by assuming the latter is, owing to its
nature, simply correct or incorrect. Contrary to such an approach, we hypothesize that knowledge is neither
true nor false; it is relevant in a certain scope. In this perspective, we state that a misconception consists in
knowledge whose the domain of validity is too wide in relation to what the associated model can really
explain in a certain context.
In the Figure 1, the teacher owns in his cognitive structure two different models to understand a certain
reality (that can be a set of phenomena represented by white circles). Depending on the context, he has the
ability to switch from one model of this reality to the other. Thus, he can use Model 1 to explain phenomena
in a certain scope, while being aware that other ones (black circle) cannot be explained by this first model
and that a more powerful model with a larger domain of validity is required (Model 2). For the same reality,
students tend to use the same model than the one of the teacher (Model 1), but they associate to this model a
larger domain of validity (S1Student>R1Teacher). We call this process an “implicit abusive generalization”.
Briefly, our teaching strategy consists in the design of teaching sequences including experience(s) that will
raise doubts as to the domain of validity the student associates to his model(s). This cognitive conflict
(Brousseau, 1989) can be triggered by confronting students to a cognitive obstacle (black circle). This is the
shrinking of the domain of validity of the Model 1, initially paradoxical for the student, which constitutes a
cognitive rupture. Moreover, this allows him to recognize the necessity of a new model (Model 2) with a
larger scope (including this time the experience that has triggered the cognitive rupture).
Figure 1. Our framework for misconception and its overcoming Figure 2. Assessment methodology
METHOD
We have established a list of misconceptions in electricity on the basis of many authors having analysed the
phenomenon of misconception (Bagheri-Crosson & Venturini, 2006; Bull et al., 2010; Demirci &
Çirkinoglu, 2004; Michelet et al., 2007; Thomas & Ding, 1991; Turgut et al., 2011). We will expose the
results of these works. Moreover, an analysis of 796 examination scripts of different students led us to two
observations. Firstly, the link between the misconceptions encountered in our literature review and the ones
we discovered during our analysis is not straightforward: the latter misconceptions in our specific context at
the university level seem mostly different. Secondly, an apparent reason of the students’ difficulties
concerns the selection skills of the solving methods and strategies (“methodological misconceptions”).
1
Other authors referred to “prior knowledge”, “preconception”, “alternative conception”, etc. A comparative analysis between
these notions and their links with other frameworks (“threshold concept” or “p-prims”) constitute a topic for on-going works.

Based on the identified misconceptions and on two existing exercises sessions, we designed two alternative
sessions. These new sessions aim the same learning outcomes than the reference ones (solving DC circuits),
but focus implicitly the learning on misconceptions. Moreover, the assistants in charge of these sessions
received specific guidelines in order to help the students to overcome their misconceptions. To assess the
efficiency of the designed strategy, the 170 2nd-year engineering students have been separated in two groups:
the Group A has followed the reference sessions and the Group B, the alternative ones (Figure 2). For each
studied lessons (7 and 8), a common pre-test was submitted to all the students in order to verify the equality
of the two groups’ level. After each exercise session, a post-test was submitted in order to assess the
differences between the groups. A delayed test was also submitted a few weeks after the experiment.
RESULTS
On the basis of the responses obtained during the pre- and post-tests, inferential statistics methods have been
used to assess the following hypotheses: (1) Groups A and B stem from the same population before doing their
respective exercise sessions, there is no significant difference between their pre-test grade distributions (95%
confidence) and (2) after the sessions, the post-test grade distribution of the Group B is significantly higher than
the one of the Group 1. To assess the hypotheses, we submitted the grades for each question of the pre- and post-
tests to parametric t-tests for independent samples and the confidence level in all tests was 95%. For example, for
the post-test 7, we observe Group B achieved better total grades than Group A (Means = 4.865 and 9.316 for
Groups A and B respectively). This effect is statistically significant: t(107)=4.717, p= .000, p < .05.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
The literature supported the presence of misconceptions among engineering students. Not only did we
confirm this statement, but we also find out new misconceptions. We propose also a framework allowing the
analysis of the misconceptions phenomenon in a new perspective, centred on the domain of validity of the
models which are used by students to understand the world. All model remaining bounded, we are aware of
the limits of such a framework. Nevertheless, this approach helped us to design, implement and validate a
misconception counter-attack strategy we therefore recommend applying in other physics fields.
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