Examinando por Autor "Barniol, Pablo"

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    Analysis and comparison of students' conceptual understanding of symmetry arguments in Gauss's and Ampere's laws
    (American Physical Society, 2023-01) Campos, Esmeralda; Hernandez, Eder; Barniol, Pablo; Zavala, Genaro
    Identifying students' difficulties in understanding Gauss's and Ampere's laws is important for developing educational strategies that promote an expertlike understanding of the field concept and Maxwell's equations of electromagnetic phenomena. This study aims to analyze and compare students' understanding of symmetry when applying Gauss's and Ampere's laws to calculate the electric or magnetic field. We conducted a study to analyze how students reason regarding the symmetry conditions necessary to apply Gauss's or Ampere's laws to calculate the electric or magnetic field in three inverse problems. We applied two open-ended questionnaires with parallel surface features, one for Gauss's law and the other for Ampere's law, to 322 engineering students. The three inverse problems present different scenarios with the common characteristic that there is no sufficient symmetry to solve the electric or magnetic field from its corresponding equation. We analyzed students' answers with a phenomenographic approach, focusing on students' answers to a yes or no question and their reasoning. The main findings of the study are the descriptive categories of understanding and the comparison of the categories between contexts (outcome space). The correct reasoning is identifying the necessary symmetry to apply Gauss's or Ampere's law. The other categories refer to the surface features of each scenario to explain students' answers, applying Gauss's or Ampere's law in an oversimplified way and thinking that it would be possible but more complicated in these scenarios. The descriptive categories are related to some of the difficulties previously reported in the literature with standard problems involving Gauss's and Ampere's laws. However, inverse problems elicited variations in the types of reasoning related to the surface features of the scenarios and their parallel representations. The comparative analysis between the electricity and magnetism contexts allowed for identifying that analyzing currents can be more challenging for students than analyzing point charges. This study's findings can guide introductory and intermediate electricity and magnetism instructors to redirect their approach to Gauss's and Ampere's laws by introducing the analysis of inverse problems. © 2023 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.
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    Calculation of vector components: A tutorial worksheet to help students develop a conceptual framework
    (Sociedade Brasileira de Física, 2015) Barniol, Pablo; Zavala, Genaro
    When we administered our Test of Understanding of Vectors (TUV) to students who were finishing a physics university remedial course (that covers subjects of a traditional high school physics course), we observed that they have considerable difficulties in calculating the x-component of a vector when the angle given is measured from the y-axis to the vector. As a result of this finding, we decided to design a tutorial worksheet that guides students through the development of a conceptual framework in this subject. The worksheet was implemented with 264 students of the same course in another semester. Upon using the TUV to evaluate the students’ understanding, we confirmed that the tutorial worksheet had facilitated their learning. This tutorial worksheet is presented in the appendix and might be used by other physics instructors who teach this material in high schools, colleges or universities.
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    Learning interference between electricity and magnetism? Analysis of patterns and consistency
    (Modestum LTD, 2023) Campos, Esmeralda; Hernández, Eder; Barniol, Pablo; Zavala, Genaro
    Due to the similarities between Gauss’s and Ampere’s laws, students can present cognitive interference when learning these laws in the introductory physics course. This study aims to analyze the interference patterns that emerge in students’ answers when solving problems that involve Gauss’s and Ampere’s laws and related concepts (e.g., electric flux and magnetic circulation). We conducted a study of 322 engineering students attending a private Mexican university. We applied two open-ended questionnaires with questions that prompted using Gauss’s and Ampere’s laws. We analyzed students’ answers to identify whether they presented some word or element of an equation from the opposite context and coded them into coding families. We analyzed the consistency of interference by counting the times each student presented some interference in general and by coding family. The results indicated that the interferences related to the shape of the Gaussian surface or Amperian trajectory and field-related concepts are shared among contexts. However, the interference related to the source of the field (charge or current) is predominant in magnetism. In contrast, the interference related to using elements from the opposite context in an equation predominates in electricity. In other words, students referred to currents as charges and wrote equations that contained B (for magnetic field) or other similar elements in Gauss’s law. The general consistency analysis revealed that around half the students presented at least one interference in both contexts. We recommend that the interference between electricity and magnetism in Gauss’s and Ampere’s laws must not be overlooked. This study’s findings can guide introductory and intermediate electricity and magnetism instructors to address this interference phenomenon. © 2023 by the authors; licensee Modestum. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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    Mechanical waves conceptual survey: Its modification and conversion to a standard multiple-choice test
    (American Physical Society, 2016) Barniol, Pablo; Zavala, Genaro
    In this article we present several modifications of the mechanical waves conceptual survey, the most important test to date that has been designed to evaluate university students’ understanding of four main topics in mechanical waves: propagation, superposition, reflection, and standing waves. The most significant changes are (i) modification of several test questions that had some problems in their original design, (ii) standardization of the number of options for each question to five, (iii) conversion of the two-tier questions to multiple-choice questions, and (iv) modification of some questions to make them independent of others. To obtain a final version of the test, we administered both the original and modified versions several times to students at a large private university in Mexico. These students were completing a course that covers the topics tested by the survey. The final modified version of the test was administered to 234 students. In this study we present the modifications for each question, and discuss the reasons behind them. We also analyze the results obtained by the final modified version and offer a comparison between the original and modified versions. In the Supplemental Material we present the final modified version of the test. It can be used by teachers and researchers to assess students’ understanding of, and learning about, mechanical waves.
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    Modifying the test of understanding graphs in kinematics
    (American Physical Society, 2017-09) Zavala, Genaro; Tejeda, Santa; Barniol, Pablo; Beichner, Robert J.
    In this article, we present several modifications to the Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics. The most significant changes are (i) the addition and removal of items to achieve parallelism in the objectives (dimensions) of the test, thus allowing comparisons of students' performance that were not possible with the original version, and (ii) changes to the distractors of some of the original items that represent the most frequent alternative conceptions. The final modified version (after an iterative process involving four administrations of test variations over two years) was administered to 471 students of an introductory university physics course at a large private university in Mexico. When analyzing the final modified version of the test it was found that the added items satisfied the statistical tests of difficulty, discriminatory power, and reliability; also, that the great majority of the modified distractors were effective in terms of their frequency selection and discriminatory power; and, that the final modified version of the test satisfied the reliability and discriminatory power criteria as well as the original test. Here, we also show the use of the new version of the test, presenting a new analysis of students' understanding not possible to do before with the original version of the test, specifically regarding the objectives and items that in the new version meet parallelisms. Finally, in the PhysPort project (physport.org), we present the final modified version of the test. It can be used by teachers and researchers to assess students' understanding of graphs in kinematics, as well as their learning about them. © 2017 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.
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    Phenomenographic analysis and comparison of students' conceptual understanding of electric and magnetic fields and the principle of superposition
    (American Physical Society, 2021-12) Campos, Esmeralda; Hernandez, Eder; Barniol, Pablo; Zavala, Genaro
    There are studies of students' understanding of the concept of the electric field, the magnetic field, and the use of the superposition principle that have contributed to the creation of both educational strategies and assessment tools. However, the difficulties of these two concepts have not been compared comprehensively. Therefore, this study aims to compare students' conceptual understanding of electric and magnetic fields in questions regarding the field created by one source and the field produced by a system of two sources. We focus our study on students' explanations about the magnitude and direction of the field and their application of the superposition principle in both contexts (electric and magnetic). We conducted this study with 322 engineering students in a Mexican university. We designed two versions of an open-ended questionnaire, one with the context of electricity and the other with magnetism. We created the questions using the parallelism between electricity and magnetism and used schematic representations with similar surface features to represent this parallelism. Analyzing the data through a phenomenographic approach, the students' drawings and explanations gave insight into their understanding of the concept of field and the superposition principle application in the context of electricity and magnetism. We found that students have similar categories of understanding the concept of the electric and the magnetic field. In both contexts, there is an evident relationship between applying the principle of superposition and understanding the concept of field. We found that there is a greater tendency that a student correctly applies the superposition principle if that student has a robust representation of the field. We found evidence that students consistently merge two different representations (vector plots and field lines) in electricity and magnetism. We named this category of representation "hybrid vectors and field lines."We also found that some students who draw hybrid representations of the field can still apply the superposition principle correctly. However, some conceptual understanding difficulties are dependent on the context: the known difficulty of confusion between forces and fields is more attached to the electricity context. The confusion between electricity and magnetism concepts is more relevant in the magnetism context. As in other literature, we found more evidence that the correct answer in multiple-choice questions may lead students who have mild difficulties (such as memorization and creating a hybrid representation) to choose a correct answer. We recommend that teachers and researchers of electricity and magnetism acknowledge the relationship between the conceptual understanding of the field and applying the superposition principle. We suggest that instructors be attentive to how they approach using representations of electric and magnetic fields. © 2021 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.
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    Phenomenographic analysis of students' conceptual understanding of electric and magnetic interactions
    (American Physical Society, 2022-07) Hernandez, Eder; Campos, Esmeralda; Barniol, Pablo; Zavala, Genaro
    Studying students' problem-solving abilities in physics education research has consistently shown that novices focus on a problem's surface features rather than its physical principles. Previous research has observed that some electricity and magnetism students confuse electricity and magnetism concepts, often presented in parallel problems (or problems with similar surface features). This confusion has been referred to as interference. It is essential to compare students' performance in these problems to evaluate their understanding of these topics. The present work focuses on the students' understanding of interactions between charged particles (i.e., electric force) and electric currents (i.e., magnetic force). We present and compare the findings on students' conceptions when analyzing electric and magnetic interactions for different systems of field sources. We conducted this study with engineering students finishing a calculus-based course on electricity and magnetism. We administered a written, open-ended questionnaire with two sets of three items: one version contained only electricity problems, and the other contained only magnetism problems. Each item in the electricity version of the test had a parallel counterpart in the magnetism version. We used a phenomenographic approach to analyze our data to identify categories that emerged from students' answers. We identified four main ideas in the results: (a) the rule of signs (ROS), which does not evidence a complete conceptual understanding of electric interactions; (b) the force-field confusion due to the similarity of electricity and magnetism contexts; (c) the importance of semiotic representation when answering an electricity and magnetism problem, where the student's choice of representation indicates their understanding, and (d) the interference phenomenon, in which we find evidence of other factors besides those produced by the timing of instruction and administration of the tests. At the end of this work, we provide recommendations for instruction. © 2022 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.
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    Students' conceptual understanding of electric flux and magnetic circulation
    (American Physical Society, 2023-01) Hernandez, Eder; Campos, Esmeralda; Barniol, Pablo; Zavala, Genaro
    Electricity and magnetism are closely related phenomena with a well-known symmetry found in Maxwell equations. An essential part of any electricity and magnetism course includes the analysis of different field source distributions through Gauss's and Ampere's laws to compute and interpret different physical quantities, such as electric flux, electric and magnetic field, or magnetic circulation. Still, some students have difficulties with these calculations or, in some cases, identifying the differences between those quantities. We present this article to explore and compare the challenges that students experience when asked to compute the electric flux (surface integral of the electric field) or the magnetic circulation (line integral of the magnetic field) in a nonsymmetric field-source distribution with two opposite field sources inside a Gaussian spherical surface or Amperian circular trajectory. The sample consisted of 322 engineering students finishing an electricity and magnetism course. They were presented with two parallel problems. Half answered one in the electricity context and the other in the magnetism context. After a phenomenographic analysis, our results showed that the students' conceptual difficulties in both contexts can be grouped into the same categories but are not contextually parallel, as has happened when analyzing other electricity and magnetism concepts. Our results also suggest that the magnetic circulation concept is far more unfamiliar to students than the electric flux. We propose several factors that could explain this finding and suggest teaching to address the conceptual difficulties identified in our analysis. © 2023 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
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    Test of Understanding Graphs in Calculus: Test of students' interpretation of calculus graphs
    (Modestum LTD, 2017) Dominguez, Angeles; Barniol, Pablo; Zavala, Genaro
    Studies show that students, within the context of mathematics and science, have difficulties understanding the concepts of the derivative as the slope and the concept of the antiderivative as the area under the curve. In this article, we present the Test of Understanding Graphs in Calculus (TUG-C), an assessment tool that will help to evaluate students' understanding of these two concepts by a graphical representation. Data from 144 students of introductory courses of physics and mathematics at a university was collected and analyzed. To evaluate the reliability and discriminatory power of this test, we used statistical techniques for individual items and the test as a whole, and proved that the test's results are satisfactory within the standard requirements. We present the design process in this paper and the test in the appendix. We discuss the findings of our research, students' understanding of the relations between these two concepts, using this new multiple-choice test. Finally, we outline specific recommendations. The analysis and recommendations can be used by mathematics or science education researchers, and by teachers that teach these concepts. © Authors.