Explorations in promoting conceptual change in electrical concepts via ontological category shift

Abstract

) suggests that much of the difficulties encountered by students in learning some Physics concepts arise because they attribute these concepts with the ontology of material substances while these concepts are actually a special type of process -"Constraint-Based Interactions". This paper reports on a series of four studies aimed at exploring the usefulness of the ontological categorization framework in investigating students' alternative conceptions of electric circuits and in developing a teaching strategy for promoting conceptual change in the learning of basic electric circuitry concepts.