2023 Volume 65 Issue 3 Pages 141-149
This research aimed to clarify the relationship between students' understanding of electric wire connection concepts and the ability to draw physical wiring diagrams in junior high school. A total of 332 students, including 2nd-grade students, who had not yet learned about electricity, and 3rd-grade students, who had learned about it, were surveyed on circuits with parallel connections. The survey enquired about their recognition of isomorphic circuits and their ability to draw physical wiring diagrams. Circuit diagrams and physical diagrams in four conditions with different positional relations or/and polarity direction arrangements of parts were prepared. Consequently, it was revealed that the understanding of the circuits tended to decrease with the rotation of the parts or when their positional relation was changed. In addition, while there was a difference in understanding between learned and non-learned circuits, in circuits close to the reference diagram there was no difference for polarity direction. Furthermore, it was found that "inner understanding," meaning recognizing the isomorphic graph as the reference diagram, and "outer understanding," meaning recognizing the non-isomorphic graph as different from the reference, were related to the ability to draw a physical wiring diagram.
