Students’ Use of Symmetry with Gauss’s Law

Authors

Adrienne L. Traxler, Wright State University - Main CampusFollow
Katrina E. Black
John R. Thompson

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

2007

Abstract

To study introductory student difficulties with electrostatics, we compared student techniques when finding the electric field for spherically symmetric and non-spherically symmetric charged conductors. We used short interviews to design a free-response and multiple-choice-multiple-response survey that was administered to students in introductory calculus-based courses. We present the survey results and discuss them in light of Singh's results for Gauss's Law, Collins and Ferguson's epistemic forms and games, and Tuminaro's extension of games and frames.

Comments

Presented at the Physics Education Research Conference, Syracuse, NY, July 26-27, 2006.

Copyright 2007 AIP Publishing. This conference proceeding may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and AIP Publishing. This conference proceeding is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2508720.

Repository Citation

Traxler, A. L., Black, K. E., & Thompson, J. R. (2007). Students’ Use of Symmetry with Gauss’s Law. AIP Conference Proceedings, 883 (173).
https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/physics/978

DOI

10.1063/1.2508720