An Empirical Research On The Cause Of Pupil's Idea On Consumption Of Current And Its Transition

A considerable amount of research has shown that there are many mistakes on the electricity concepts for middle school pupils and university students, the practice show that it is very hard to change these ideas. Those ideas will have a great effect on learning scientific conceptions. Therefore, how to improve conceptual change from the pre-conceptions to scientific conceptions has been an important problem in educational psychology.The study tested 133 pupils in total coming from Grade 9 and Grade 11 with paper-pencil test. The test is divided into three stages:Stage 1:Testees were asked to present their electricity conceptionStage 2:At the stage of judging others' view, then say whether or not to change their viewStage 3:At the stage of evaluating experiment. Then say whether or not to change their viewThrough analyzing Grade 9 and Grade 11's questionnaire, It discovered that:1.75% of Grade 9,93% of Grade 11 think the electric current in a circuit shall be partly consumed by resistors or bulbs.73%,94.1% of the pupils use "local reasoning" and "sequential reasoning" to solve problems on DC circuits,64.6% of Grade 9,55.3% Grade 11 think that the constant current flows from the "+" terminals of a battery and is independent of the elements in the circuit.2. With the Chi-square test of the frequency of two Grade, it showed that the test P value was 0.000, far below 0.01.Therefore, it concluded that the achievement of Grade 9 is better than Grade 11, even if Grade 11 study more electrical knowledge, but it is no use to establish a scientific model of current and resistance in this paper.3. When we show a simple electrical circuit in which a battery was connected to a light bulb, then insert two ammeters before and after the light bulb, the ammeters show that the current on each side of the light bulb was the same. We show the experiment to one class, However 91.8% of the pupils reject the famous experimental finding, they still think the current wears out.4. In this case, a lot of pupils think that electric current shall be partly consumed by resistors or bulbs.60% of those think that there is no collision between "current wearing out" (weakening of the current while crossing the bulb) and the electric current is equal In the series circuit, the two ideas can Live together peacefully.5. The pupils who have the misconceptions about electric current and resistance is more willing to modify their misconceptions in the stage of evaluating experiment.the ratio of changing current misconception in the stage 3 is significantly higher than the stage 2, and the ratio of changing resistance misconception in the stage 3 is close to as the stage 2, physics experiment play a significant role in understanding of physical concepts, we should pay attention to experiment.6. Through evaluating of theory and experiment stage, the changing of different alternative conceptions is different. Pupils modify misconceptions of resistance better than current.according to my research and others,1 find some reason to explain why the pupils believe that current is consumed and why it is difficult for pupil to change their misconception. Because pupils have construct a system of a electricity concept by themselves, the system is this:"in a simple electrical circuit, the battery is a device to provide constant current, they neglect the effect of the change of elements on the whole circuit,the current is like water, the constant current flows from the positive terminals of the battery, then flows through the circuit step by step, when the electric current pass through the resistors or bulbs, Some of it is used up by the resistors or bulbs,The leftover electricity goes back along the other wire to the battery,so we need to replace the old battery, "hard core" of pupils Theory is that "the current is consumed," so pupils can explain easily why the bulb light,Why the battery runs out and so on. The system of pupil's electricity concept is so complete, reasonable and logic, so pupils believe deeply that consumption of current and not change the idea in their mind.The reason why pupils believe consumption of current may be that pupils can't distinguish between the "energy" form of current and the "material" form. a possible solution of the question may give pupil a better analogy, we can explain the role of the current as a circulating, conserved carrier of electrical energy, so pupil know the current-energy distinction and build science conception.After knowing the reason of why pupils think the electric current was partly consumed by resistors or bulbs, we find an instruction about the electric current based on the Conceptual Change theory and the system of pupil's electricity concept, the purpose is using our instruction and the traditional instruction on the electric current in two classes. After the instruction, Post-test is used to evaluate students'achievement. The results of this study conclude that the control class' achievement is more significant improved than the experimental class. The result indicates that our instruction can help pupils to build scientific conceptions of Current.At last, this text reviewed some respects such as tool, data analysis of the study etc. according to the result of this research, it offers some reference suggestions to the forefront teachers.