Abstract
It has been proposed that children's preconceptions can influence their progress in the initial stages of learning electrical concepts in the context of electric circuits. But little is known about the ideas children have about electric circuits beyond these early steps and how to utilize children's ideas to teach them these scientific concepts. The purpose of this study was to investigate the children's comprehension after being taught by conventional instruction, and to propose a new teaching strategy. For this purpose, we conducted research and instruction on a third grade class, lower secondary school. The following results were obtained: (1) On the learning of electric circuits, the children made superficial progress in learning to calculate the intensity of electric currents, voltage and electrical resistance by using scientific laws; at the same time, the children developed a "traffic flow model" of electric circuits. It is not easy to exchange their traffic flow model with the scientific model. (2) To exchange their traffic model with the scientific model, it is useful to use a two step teaching approach: First to enrich the children's knowledge and, second to use "the method of restructurization" that restructures those ideas learned in the first step.
