From Learning Capacitance to Making Capacitors: the Missing Critical Sensemaking
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From Learning Capacitance to Making Capacitors: the Missing Critical Sensemaking Lin Ding 1
& Zehao
Jia 2 & Ping Zhang 2
Received: 28 January 2020 / Accepted: 29 June 2020/ # Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan 2020
Abstract Motivated by often passingly brief textbook discussions of industrial capacitors, this study examines how students make sense of textbook descriptions to create an industrial rolled-up capacitor. A total of 37 junior-year students at a top high school in Beijing, China, participated in the study. The participants followed their textbook guidance and used the parallel-plate structure as a prototype to make a rolled-up capacitor. To better understand their reasoning, we randomly selected 6 students for interviews: 2 from each of the higher-, middle-, and lower-achieving groups according to their course grades. Each interviewee was asked to recreate a capacitor, draw electric field lines for the (charged) capacitor, and compare its capacitance to that of a parallel-plate structure. Student work showed that the participants took textbook descriptions at face value without considering critical issues such as short circuit. Students’ reasoning of electric field and capacitance revealed that they confused electric field with magnetic field and held classic, nonnormative ideas that liken capacitance to the volume of a body. These results notwithstanding, two middle- and lowerachieving students attempted to make of the rolled-up capacitor and demonstrated a design mindset in their reasoning. Ironically, those traditionally considered as higher-achieving students showed no advantage in this task. Keywords Physics education . Capacitance . Content and context . Reasoning
* Ping Zhang [email protected] Lin Ding [email protected]
1
Department of Teaching and Learning, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA
2
Department of Physics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, People’s Republic of China
L. Ding et al.
Introduction Learning of physics, like any human cognition process, is highly contextualized (Ding & Reay, 2014; Finkelstein, 2005; Hammer, Elby, Scherr, & Redish, 2005). Environments that bring about a learning event can greatly influence, as well as be influenced by, the learning (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989). That is why a student’s responses to what physicists consider as isomorphic questions can vary significantly if contextual elements in task, situation, or local culture change (Singh, 2008). It is because of this attribute of learning, in addition to unique characteristics of physics content (Heckler, 2011), that physics instruction must necessarily afford students with multiple ways to experience target topics. As an important learning resource, physics textbooks are often designed to deploy diverse techniques, using, for example, different question formats, representations, and examples to enrich discussions of target concepts. In contemporary textbooks, relating focal topics to real-world applications is a common practice. Take the concept of capacitance f
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