Examinando por Autor "Campos, Esmeralda"
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Ítem Impact of virtual reality use on the teaching and learning of vectors(Frontiers Media S.A., 2022-09) Campos, Esmeralda; Hidrogo, Irving; Zavala, GenaroThe use of virtual reality in education has enabled the possibility of representing abstract concepts and virtually manipulating them, providing a suitable platform for understanding mathematical concepts and their relation with the physical world. In this contribution, we present a study that aims to evaluate the students’ experience using a virtual reality (VR) tool and their learning of three-dimensional vectors in an introductory physics university course. We followed an experimental research design, with a control and an experimental group, for measuring students’ performance in a pre-post 3D vectors questionnaire. We surveyed the experimental group about their perception of VR use regarding their learning objectives, their experience using VR as a learning tool during the sessions, and the value of using VR in class. We found that on the items in which visualization was important, students in the experimental group outperformed the students in the control group. Students evaluated the VR tool as having a positive impact on their course contents learning and as a valuable tool to enhance their learning experience. We identified four hierarchical categories in which students perceived the use of virtual reality helped them learn the course contents: Visualization, 3D Visualization, Identification, and Understanding. Overall, this study’s findings contribute to the knowledge of using virtual reality for education at the university level. We encourage university instructors to think about incorporating VR in their classes. Copyright © 2022 Campos, Hidrogo and Zavala.Ítem Learning interference between electricity and magnetism? Analysis of patterns and consistency(Modestum LTD, 2023) Campos, Esmeralda; Hernández, Eder; Barniol, Pablo; Zavala, GenaroDue 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/).Ítem Phenomenographic analysis of students' conceptual understanding of electric and magnetic interactions(American Physical Society, 2022-07) Hernandez, Eder; Campos, Esmeralda; Barniol, Pablo; Zavala, GenaroStudying 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.Ítem Students' conceptual understanding of electric flux and magnetic circulation(American Physical Society, 2023-01) Hernandez, Eder; Campos, Esmeralda; Barniol, Pablo; Zavala, GenaroElectricity 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.Ítem Students' understanding of the concept of the electric field through conversions of multiple representations(American Physical Society, 2020-06) Campos, Esmeralda; Zavala, Genaro; Zuza, Kristina; Guisasola, JenaroWe conducted a study with introductory and upper-division level physics students in a Mexican and a Spanish university to learn how students recognize the main characteristics of the electric field in three of its more widely used representations, namely, algebraic notation, vector field plot, and electric field lines, and how the students do conversions of them. The students' abilities to recognize the three representations of the electric field and do conversions gave insight into their understanding of this concept. We used the theory of registers of semiotic representations as a framework to analyze the data. Our results showed that the direction of the conversion is an essential factor in determining the students' success in performing conversions of electrical field representations. We found close synergy between the vector field plot and the algebraic notation of the electric field. However, we found that the conversions that involve electric field lines do not present synergy. The electric field lines representation is especially difficult for students, both as a source and as a target representation, specifically, the interpretation and representation of the magnitude of the field through the density of field lines. We recommend that teachers and researchers of electricity and magnetism be more conscious of the difficulties that some conversion tasks may present to their students. We specifically invite instructors to be attentive to how they approach the representation of electric field lines and be explicit when performing conversions that involve electric field lines.