Enhancing conceptual understanding of electricity and magnetism: Experiences from an Indian university

Context

Students studying for disciplines such as Electrical and Electronics engineering need a good foundation in Electricity and Magnetism (EM). Therefore, it is imperative to know the prior knowledge of students in this topic to address misunderstandings and misconceptions.

Purpose or Goal

Our motivation is to help students to improve their learning in EM in the post-covid era. We want to introduce suitable pedagogy and learning technology that helps address conceptual misconceptions and engages students.

Methods

We administered the conceptual inventory (CI) known as Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment (BEMA) to students at an Indian university studying for a physics degree. Students took BEMA in the first week of the semester (pre-test) and once at the end of the semester (post-test). We introduced the world class Pearson products, viz, Mastering Physics (MP) and Learning Catalytics (LC) and undertook a survey on MP and LC to understand the students’ perspective.

Outcomes

We found that the scores from BEMA went from 24 % (pre-test) to 39 % (post-test) which is statistically significant with a large effect size (0.99). The results from the MP and LC surveys are positive which indicate that these tools were well received by students.

Conclusion

There is an improvement in the conceptual understanding of EM. MP and LC are important factors in the student learning of the subject. Students indicate that they find MP and LC quite useful. Also, the Elearning fatigue needs to be addressed to help students improve further. We intend to introduce BEMA and other CIs to engineering students through our engineering faculty colleagues and use tools such as MP and LC to help students build a solid foundation in EM and physics in general.