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

Abstract

Chi (1992, 1993) Chi et al. (1994) suggests that many of the difficulties encountered by students in learning Physics concepts arise because they attribute the ontology of material substances to these concepts. These concepts are actually a special type of process - 'Constraint-Based Interactions' (CBI). Slotta and Chi (1996) reported on a study where a group of students explicitly trained in the CBI ontology showed significant gains over a control group in problem solving performance in eight simple electric circuit problems. This paper reports on a series of four studies which explore 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.