In teaching electrostatics and electric circuits, it is necessary to introduce abstract ideas such as electric fields and electric potential before discussions of circuits can take place. The Physics Education Group at the University of Washington has found that students in introductory courses can build a functional understanding of some aspects of electric fields and potential, but their understanding of these concepts appears to falter when applied to systems involving conductors. Some specific examples will be discussed. The results will be used to inform the further development of tutorials in electrostatics.

This paper compares the effect on student understanding from using either real-world circuits or an interactive circuit simulation. Three groups of students who worked through a tutorial on multiple-loop circuits from Tutorials in Introductory Physics, one with real circuits and two with a simulation, were compared in terms of their conceptual understanding after instruction. Students who used the simulation completed the tutorial faster and had more time for discussion with the TAs, and generally scored higher on conceptual questions than did those who used real circuits.

Over the past several years, the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington has been developing tutorial worksheets for small-group sections for junior-level electrodynamics courses. We have observed that most of our students enter these courses with a working knowledge of static electric and magnetic fields in simple systems. However, many students have significant difficulties in transferring this knowledge to other vector fields. We first attempted to address these difficulties by having students draw analogies from basic static fields to new vector fields, but this strategy proved to be challenging for many students. Our subsequent attempt focused on familiarizing students with how the divergence and curl of a vector field defines that vector field. This approach is proving successful in enabling students to then relate this knowledge of general vector fields to understand newly introduced vector fields.

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