Acquisition of Conceptual Understanding in Electricity Instruction
Papadouris and Constantinou argued that the accumulation of experiences with
natural phenomena through active exploration, investigation, and interpretation provided
a basis for the development of conceptual understanding. The role of active experimentation by students in science learning was also emphasized by Steinberg . He stated
that at least two elements appeared to be critical in making science instruction successful.
First, successful instruction was based on understanding how students made sense of
the subject matter. That is, instruction had to take into account the ideas and conceptions
the students already have about the subject matter. As stated in the Introduction, electricity is an abstract and intangible concept; however, most people have conceptions, often
prescientific and idiosyncratic ones, about what electricity is and how electricity behaves.
Steinberg emphasized the importance for instructors to help students elicit their own conceptions and use those conceptions as a starting point for the instruction.
Second, students had to be actively engaged in finding out what was happening instead
of just witnessing something being presented to them. They needed to make predictions,
design experiments, analyze and interpret the collected data, and formulate answers to their research questions; in other words, they had to be engaged in a process of inquiry learning