Determining Turkish high school students’ misconceptions about electric charge imbalance by using a four-tier misconception test

Abstract

Abstract This study aims to determine Turkish high school students’ misconceptions about the electric charge imbalance by using a four-tier misconception test, where the main questions are accompanied by a question about the reason for the answer, as well as student declarations about their degrees of certainty. A four-tier electric charge imbalance misconception test (4-tier ECIMT) was developed by Onder-Celikkanli (2019) in the context of her dissertation. It consists of 24 questions, each consisting of four tiers. It is limited to (a) electric interactions between charged bodies, (b) electric interactions between a charged body and a neutral body, and (c) electric interactions between two neutral bodies. It was administered to 402 tenth-grade Turkish high school students in Turkey. At the end of the study, some new misconceptions were introduced to the literature. One of the most important ones is ‘the magnitude of the electric force between the two objects is independent of the relative permittivity of the medium between them’.