The Persistence of Prior Concepts about Electric Potential, Current Intensity and Ohm’s Law in Students of Engineering

Abstract

The aim of this research was to evaluate and analyze second-year industrial-engineering and chemical-engineering students’ prior knowledge of conceptual aspects of circuit theory. Specifically, we have focused on the basic concepts of electric potential and current intensity and on the fundamental relationship between these as expressed by Ohm’s Law. In order to find out what the students’ prior concepts were, we applied a survey containing nine questions dealing with the most basic concepts of circuit theory. Let us emphasize that there was little information available about the prior concepts of the population type (university students) investigated in this research.

Keywords

• Ideas previas
• teoría de circuitos
• estudiantes de Ingeniería.