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From Learning Capacitance to Making Capacitors: the Missing Critical Sensemaking

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Abstract

Motivated by often passingly brief textbook discussions of industrial capacitors, this study examines how students make sense of textbook descriptions to create an industrial rolled-up capacitor. A total of 37 junior-year students at a top high school in Beijing, China, participated in the study. The participants followed their textbook guidance and used the parallel-plate structure as a prototype to make a rolled-up capacitor. To better understand their reasoning, we randomly selected 6 students for interviews: 2 from each of the higher-, middle-, and lower-achieving groups according to their course grades. Each interviewee was asked to recreate a capacitor, draw electric field lines for the (charged) capacitor, and compare its capacitance to that of a parallel-plate structure. Student work showed that the participants took textbook descriptions at face value without considering critical issues such as short circuit. Students’ reasoning of electric field and capacitance revealed that they confused electric field with magnetic field and held classic, nonnormative ideas that liken capacitance to the volume of a body. These results notwithstanding, two middle- and lower-achieving students attempted to make of the rolled-up capacitor and demonstrated a design mindset in their reasoning. Ironically, those traditionally considered as higher-achieving students showed no advantage in this task.

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Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Department of Physics at Beijing Normal University and Department of Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University for support on discipline-based physics education research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Teaching and Learning, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, 43210, USA

    Lin Ding

  2. Department of Physics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, People’s Republic of China

    Zehao Jia & Ping Zhang

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  1. Lin Ding
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  2. Zehao Jia
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  3. Ping Zhang
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Correspondence to Ping Zhang.

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Ding, L., Jia, Z. & Zhang, P. From Learning Capacitance to Making Capacitors: the Missing Critical Sensemaking. Int J of Sci and Math Educ 19, 1357–1373 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-020-10112-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10763-020-10112-7

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