Contrasting-cases problems: Learning material to improve students' conceptual understanding on magnetism

Abstract

We have developed three sets of contrasting-cases problems as learning material to improve students' conceptual understanding on magnetism. The contrasting-cases problems consisted of several different problems with the same physic idea. This paper reports the effectiveness of the learning material drawn from a quasi-experiment, one group of pre-test post-test design. The subject consisted of 24 undergraduate students of physics education enrolling electromagnetism course in the State University of Malang. The results showed that the contrasting-cases problems effectively improved students' understanding with very high d-effect size (2.12). However, some sets of contrasting-cases problems need to be improved.