High school student difficulties in drawing the field lines for two magnets

Abstract

We report the results of a study on high school student difficulties in drawing the magnetic field lines for two magnets facing each other. Student difficulties were investigated by means of a predict-observe-explain activity. Our data confirm some of the previous results from the educational research literature on student difficulties in drawing and interpreting field lines and shed some new light on students’ reasoning patterns. Specific difficulties for the case of two magnets with opposite poles facing each other are also identified.