Students' Understandings of Electricity and Magnetism

Abstract

In this chapter we highlight some of the physics education literature on students' ideas about electricity and magnetism. The research reviewed spans all age groups and includes work carried out within a wide variety of frameworks. We start the chapter with students' ideas about electric charge, attraction and repulsion, charging, polarization, and magnetic interactions primarily from a qualitative viewpoint. We then describe research related to students adopting a more quantitative approach: electrostatic and magnetostatic force and field; the superposition principle; electric potential, electric potential energy, and capacitance. Sections on representations and commonly used diagnostic tests serve as a bridge to more advanced topics that often also require more advanced mathematical techniques such as integration and vector calculus: Gauss' Law, Ampère's Law, and Faraday's Law. Throughout the chapter we highlight where we have found gaps in the literature.