Addressing Some Physical Misconceptions in Electrostatics of Freshman Engineering Students

Abstract

While the electrostatics is important topic consisting one among the four pillars of electromagnetic theory, as being represented by Gauss’s law, students persist encountering difficulties in its understanding. Even though the trend looks universal, we triggered an investigation to search for the main reasons behind the students’ misconceptions of electric field and flux aiming to analyze their origins and to search for intervention pathways to make corrections and, thus, to enhance the students learning of these physical concepts. The subject of our statistical sample is a group of 211 freshman engineering students taking the course of “Physics and Engineering Applications II”. Tests were designed for the diagnosis of the origins of students’ struggles in an attempt to find plausible interventional solutions to reduce the effects. Indeed, the statistics of results shows evidence of deviation of students in figuring out the correct answers and characterizes the depths of the misconceptions and shortcomings. Under the light of our discussions, alternative interventions are suggested to reduce the size of difficulties in learning and to pave the way for better understanding of the physical concepts and achieving better results.