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surprising learning gains in very short periods of
time. In MBL, students for example might move
a car back and forth, while a computer graphed
its motion in real-time via a sonic distance sen-
sor. Heather Brasell (1987) has shown marked
improvement in younger students' graphing skills
after just 40 minutes of instruction, and Linn et
al. (1987) show that this improvement asymptotes
rather quickly at about the 70% level even after a
year of experience with MBL. Abbott et al. (2000)
actually have examined the effects of one 2-hour
active learning laboratory in electrical circuits
(students worked with real bulbs and circuits).
They did find some significant learning gains
using a pretest and posttest as well.
ten time related questions versus the ten which
were not time related. As the graph illustrates,
students did worse on time related questions on
the pretest than non-time related questions (53%
vs. 68% correct, respectively). By the posttest,
students answered on par in both categories (73%
vs. 71% correct). Thus students showed a gain on
time-related questions, yet not on non-time related
questions. An ANCOVA analysis using the pretest
as a covariant showed a difference between the
two categories (F(1,77)=9.81, p=.0025).
Limitations of the circuit Simulation
Students using our animated circuit simulation did
not show improvement on
all
our concept inven-
tory test questions in our pilot. In particular they
showed no improvement on the non-temporal test
questions. We believe part of the difficulty students
have with these questions lies in the conflation of
different variables (such as voltage vs. current) or
a lack of distinction between components (capaci-
tor vs. inductor) and circuit configurations (series
vs. parallel). We have previously referred to this
student difficulty as
undifferentiated concepts
.
Students may either conflate or mix-up different
concept pairs, such as voltage and current, volt-
age and power, AC and DC, series and parallel,
capacitors and inductors, and low pass and high
pass filter circuits. We have often observed that
students have to resort to memorization to remem-
ber these distinctions, which means they may still
not understand the inherent underlying reasons
for these distinctions.
What then is required to get students to at-
tend to these important distinctions and possibly
improve on
all
the questions in our AC/DC Con-
cept Inventory, including the non-temporal test
questions? We describe an instructional strategy
that we are in the process of pursuing known as
contrasting cases
.
results from Pilot Study
with Simulation
This study showed significant conceptual change
gains, despite the short intervention. Overall, the
gains were weak, with only a 12% increase in test
scores, however, eight of the twenty questions on
the misconceptions test showed more significant
and larger gains (highlighted in bright red in Figure
2 and bright green in Figure 3). These eight ques-
tions did not have any structural characteristics
in common. They included questions involving
DC, DC capacitors, AC, and AC capacitor cir-
cuits. Some of the questions were very similar to
the circuits explored in the simulation, and some
were not (far transfer questions). What is the con-
nection between the seemingly unrelated eight
questions on which students showed significant
gains? The connection appears to be that some
questions on the test may force one to imagine
the behavior of the circuit over time. A post-hoc
analysis identified ten questions on the test that
involve considerations of circuit behavior over
time. Eight of these questions are the same eight
questions identified before which showed signifi-
cant gains. Figure 4 shows performance on these
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