Abstract:

Hydrostatics is one of the topics closely connected to our daily life, and at the same time it is also a physics topic that is covered across the whole vertical in the Slovenian curriculum. However, it is well known that there are many misconceptions in this field. Since teachers play a big role in resolving misconceptions, we were interested in how well future primary school teachers understand concepts in hydrostatics. Therefore, we conducted a survey among first-year students at the Faculty of Education of the University of Ljubljana, in which we analysed students' responses to an online quiz on hydrostatics. The quiz included common hydrostatics concepts such as density, hydrostatic pressure, and buoyancy. The quiz was solved after lectures and lab work in 2020, with the entire process taking place remotely due to the Covid-19 pandemic. With the survey, we aimed to find out where misconceptions occur and identify content problems in the field of hydrostatics. The results show that students have the most misconceptions about the concepts of buoyancy and hydrostatic pressure. In particular, they have difficulty relating the above concepts to density, mass, and volume. The results are a guide for us to develop new learning content not only for distance learning but also for classroom work.

Keywords:

Hydrostatics, density, buoyancy, hydrostatic pressure, misconceptions, future primary school teachers.