Assessment of students’ understanding of electric and magnetic fields in high school

In physics education, the electricity and magnetism high school curriculum in Austria includes learning abstract concepts, such as static electric and magnetic fields, and their interactions with matter. This is different to learning about electric circuits at middle-school level, which has been researched extensively. The difficulties in learning such abstract concepts have been studied mostly at undergraduate introductory and advanced levels, with a few exceptions in high school. The objective of this study is to diagnose Austrian high school students’ understanding of electric and magnetic fields and interactions and identify their most common difficulties. To achieve this objective, we conducted a study with a mixed methods approach with a concurrent triangulation design. The participants were 265 high school students in Austria, who answered a multiple-choice questionnaire and open-ended questions on several topics of electricity and magnetism. We found that students have difficulties with using and interpreting the field representations, such as creating hybrid representations of field lines and vector arrows. Both in the quantitative and qualitative results, the confusion between electricity and magnetism was evident: in electricity, students would treat the electric field as magnetic field, and in magnetism, the students would treat magnets as charged poles.