Common Misunderstandings of Electricity: Analysis of Interview- Responses of Electrical Engineering Technology Students

Abstract

In the recent decade the wide body of research on misconceptions focused on establishing understandable schemes of why some scientific concepts are so difficult to understand for students in various Engineering Technology majors. The present interview-based, qualitative study of two student groups opened some interesting insides and explains common struggling of learning the basic electrical concepts. It had been observed that progressing from a freshman to a senior level, students developed strong technical/terminological vocabulary, but often they were unable to clear explain what those terms mean. Both student cohorts (from freshmen to seniors) continuously applied incorrect “water-analogy” to the concepts of current flow. Also, in majority of cases, they perceive electricity ontologically incorrect as a “Substance-that-can-be-used-up”.