Patrice Venturini

Analyse du raisonnement d'étudiants utilisant les concepts de base de l'électromagnétisme

Very few works in didactics of physics on electromagnetism showed the existence of students’ difficulties concerning the comprehension and the use of the concept of magnetic field and the associated concepts. In order to understand these difficulties, we studied the reasoning used by undergraduate students when they use in various situations the basic concepts of electromagnetism, using the “theory of conceptual fields”. We thus could identify the operational invariants used and the organization of their behaviour. We showed that very few students control the pertinence and the coherence of their answers. Moreover that the operational invariants are not contextualized to the problem-solving situation and they are often used without any physical meaning.