Students' conceptual understanding of electric flux and magnetic circulation
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Fecha
2023-01
Profesor/a Guía
Facultad/escuela
Idioma
en
Título de la revista
ISSN de la revista
Título del volumen
Editor
American Physical Society
Nombre de Curso
Licencia CC
CC BY 4.0 DEED Attribution 4.0 International
Licencia CC
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Resumen
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.
Notas
Indexación: Scopus.
Palabras clave
Physics Education Research, Electricity and magnetism, Scientific reasoning & problem solving, Symmetry, Maxwell equations, Magnetic field, Magnetic circulation
Citación
Physical Review Physics Education Research. Volume 19, Issue 1. January 2023. Article number 013102
DOI
10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.19.013102