Students' Understanding of Electric Current in a Simple Circuit and Effective Models Made by Students

Abstract

This study analyzes students' understanding of electric current and tries to examine how to develop it. A simple electric circuit is chosen for observation, consisting of a dry cell battery and a miniature light bulb or a miniature motor. To describe the experimental result, a "particle model" and an "arrow model" are introduced at the beginning. As a result, children are dissatisfied with their drawing because the current is constant before and after passing through the bulb, which seems to disagrees with their daily experience that batteries are depleted as used. Then children find problems with the given descriptive models and design their own model, which turns out to be effective in that it accounts for the apparent contradiction they encountered.