New Perspectives in Science Education

This study focuses on students’ misconceptions regarding static electricity, the effectiveness of conceptual change instruction on students’ understanding of static electricity and their attitudes towards physics. The subjects of the present study consisted of 70 tenth-grade students (39 boys and 31 girls) from two physics classes taught by the same teacher in a high school in Turkey. Students’ ages ranged from 16 to 17 years.

Each of the two instructional methods was randomly assigned to one class after individuals were already in each class. The data were obtained from 36 students in the experimental group and 34 students in the control group. The language of instruction in both groups was Turkish. Conceptual change and traditional instruction methods were used as teaching methods in the study.

The test contained 25 multiple-choice questions was applied the groups. Each question had one correct answer and four distracters. During the development stage of the test, the following procedure was followed: firstly, the instructional objectives of the unit electrostatics were stated. Secondly, a classification of students’ misconceptions in electrostatics was constructed by a careful examination of related literature. Lastly, the test items were constructed in such a way that each distracter or item brings out students’ alternative conceptions related to electrostatics. Hence the purpose of the test was to measure students’ understanding of static electricity concepts, all items in the test were conceptual and no quantitative calculations were needed to answer the questions. The reliability (alpha) of the test was found to be 0.75

The results showed that the students have misconceptions and the experimental group students performed better with respect to the success in eliminating the misconception compared to the control group. In addition, it has been found that there was no significant difference between the attitudes of students in the experimental and control groups both before and after teaching. Teaching strategies can be used to determine the misconceptions and enhance students’ understanding.