Abstract:

In this study, effects of use computer simulations and application of conceptual change texts on students’ academic performance of electrostatic, attitudes towards physics and eliminating the misconceptions were researched and both techniques were investigated in comparison. Findings obtained from the analysis are examined a significant increase in performance rates of experimental and control group. Additionally, no significant difference was observed between the groups. There has been no significant difference found in students’ attitudes between experimental and control group. Furthermore, results showed that the students have misconceptions, the experimental and control group students performed better with respect to the success in eliminating the misconceptions.

The subjects of the present study consisted of 94 first year undergraduate students from two physics classroom taught by the same teacher in the first class of university students in Turkey. Students’ ages ranged from 17 to 18 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 57 students in the experimental group and 37 students in the control group.
Electricity has an important technological role of our life. It is very important to meaningful learning for the students, teachers and peoples. Meaningful learning of the electric concepts can play important role to improve students’ learning ability and creativity. We can use different methods to provide the meaningful learning. In this study, we used two active methods to identify which methods play effective role on understanding static electric concepts. So, the purpose of this study was to determine the effects of use of computer simulations and application of conceptual change texts on the undergraduate students’ academic performance of electrostatic topics, attitudes towards physics and eliminating the misconception were researched and both techniques were investigated in comparison. The simulations used in this study were collected from the internet related to physics web site about the static electric concepts and presented the experimental group students at the classroom during the lessons. Conceptual change texts were prepared by the researchers according to students’ misconceptions identifying from the pretest. In addition to confront the student real world application of static electric, we used some technological application of the static electric. For examples: lightning conductor, lightning flash, copier machine etc.

Keywords:

Teaching method, physics education, misconceptions, simulations, innovation and learning.