La comprensión de problemas de campo eléctrico en estudiantes universitarios: aspectos de la instrucción en la organización de representaciones

Abstract

The author's experience in college teaching has allowed for acknowledging the lasting reiteration of failures in a group of students when solving examination problems, in which the concept of electric field is relevant.Even among those who come up with satisfactory answers, it is quite common to notice that in their verbal explanation of these solutions they seem to adequately apply formal structures though without granting any physical meaning to the concepts they have used. Often there is a doubt whether the activation of a resolution scheme is linked to the activation of another resolution scheme that has been previously applied to the situations students consider as analogous to the ones at hand. The research developed in this thesis aimed at an in-depth analysis of learning situations in the classroom, when the concept of electric field is taught in the diverse classroom activities. The goal here has been to inquire into issues linked to the understanding of this concept and to the students' achievement in examinations, and, based on the obtained results, to study the effectiveness of a proposal of pedagogical intervention. The research question focuses on where the student is in relation to what he/she knows about the concept of electric field in problem solving linked to developing representations, establishing conditions, developing inferences, organizing thoughts, recuperating resolutions schemes, designing strategies, and grappling with dialectically different resolution assumptions and approaches. The Theory of Meaningful Learning, by Ausubel and Novak, the Theory of Mental Models, by Johnson-Laird, and the Theory of Conceptual Fields, by Vergnaud, constitute the theoretical framework of this thesis. Contributions stemmed from epistemological foundations of science together with their pedagogical implications have been also applied.