%0 PDF %T High School Students' Representations and Understandings of The Electric Field. %A Cao, Ying. %8 2017-04-20 %R http://localhost/files/dn39xd29c %X Abstract: This dissertation investigates high school students' representations and understandings of the electric field when students engage in informal, open-ended classroom activities prior to receiving formal instruction. The electric field is an important concept in physics. It is usually taught in high school and college. Due to the fact that human eyes cannot directly see the electric field, and that the theories of the electric field involve multiple factors and non-linear relationships, learning of the electric field often appears difficult to students. Past research has investigated the difficulties students have while they learn the electric field, have largely adopted formal assessments as a way to evaluate students' understandings of the electric field, were carried out while students were taking courses about the electric field, and most of them focused on college students. In this dissertation, I identify gaps in the current literature. First, high school students' understandings of the electric field need more attention from educational researchers, because most students first encounter the concept of the electric field in high school. Second, students' ideas of the electric field prior to receiving formal instruction expressed in informal, everyday-language should be studied in more depth, because these prior ideas will contribute to their learning of the electric field. This dissertation bridges these gaps by studying high school students' representations and understandings of the electric field expressed in informal, open-ended classroom activities prior to receiving formal instruction. The participants in this dissertation study were high school students ages 15 or 16, were enrolled in a summer school in China when I implemented the electricity lesson featured in this study. During the electricity lesson, the participant students took part in two open-ended activities. One activity involved playing with a computer game that simulates the electric field as a hockey field. The other activity involved drawing comic strips about electric charges as if they were characters in a cartoon series. Post class, a small sample of students was interviewed about their work of the comic strip activity. I carried out qualitative analyses on student written work and on transcripts of interview videos and classroom videos. Results are presented in three standalone studies. The first study examines high school students' representations and understandings of the electric field when they produced arrow diagrams in the comic strip activity. The second study reports on students' narratives about electric charges and interactions in the comic strip activity. The third study reports on a students' group interaction in the classroom with an educational computer game that simulates the electric field as a hockey field.; Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2015.; Submitted to the Dept. of Education.; Advisor: Bárbara Brizuela.; Committee: Michelle Wilkerson-Jerde, Gary Goldstein, and Ayush Gupta.; Keywords: Education, and Science education. %[ 2022-10-11 %9 Text %~ Tufts Digital Library %W Institution