Electric circuits study through students drawings: a pedagogic strategy to make explicit the conceptual difficulties

Abstract

This article proposes to incorporate the language of the drawings
to the traditional conventional symbolism used in the study of
electrical circuits. The objective is to work this representation
mode with High School students together with the scientific
language. We show that the pictorial mode, that doesn t demand
the knowledge of the official codes, has the potential to detect
students conceptual difficulties, preventing them from being
hidden by the abstract and anti-intuitive official symbolism. The
idea is to permit that learners, during the learning process,
may express themselves through direct and intuitive symbols,
instead of being forced to use exclusively the norms and codes
from official semiotics, as it has been traditionally done. We will
see that the instructional modality based on the students drawings
allows a rich opportunity for the teacher to generate discussions
and to keep up with the construction of his/her student knowledge
in classroom.