Moroccan high school students find major difficulties in understanding the concepts related to electricity. The problem lies not only in the knowledge itself but also in the teaching practices. Even worse, in the Moroccan educational system, the lack of experimental activities and the low rate of integration of educational technologies hinder an effective teaching of these concepts. Indeed, the lack of these experimental activities is the main cause of the introduction of the erroneous conceptions. This lack can be remedied through simulation. The simulation is the one-off solution for the phenomena invisible to the human eye. In this chapter, the authors review the literature of the main pedagogical approaches used to facilitate the acquisition of phenomena of electricity and specially the historical investigation approach based on collaborative learning. Also, they highlight the added value of the combination of the investigation and simulation of phenomena of electricity.
TopIntroduction
The physics sciences are considered among the most difficult disciplines to be assimilated by high school students. Moroccan students are not exception: They find major difficulties in understanding the concepts related to electricity(Alj & Benjelloun, 2013; Mohammed Chekour, 2018). Studies show that electrical circuits are rarely controlled by high school students (Psillos, 1998). The analysis of their reasoning shows that they have retained naive representations of the notions of intensity and tension despite formal education (Viennot, 1996). The existence of several currents in a circuit (Tiberghien & Delacôte, 1976), the degradation of the current in a circuit (Benseghir & Closset, 1993) and the analysis of each circuit element in terms of before and after (Szczygielski, 2009) are only examples of these misconceptions. As well, the analysis of the conceptions of the students of the Sebelas Maret University concluded that most of them still find misconceptions and do not understand the value of capacitor capacitance, the influence of the capacitor charge and discharge towards the loads (Saputro, Sarwanto, Sukarmin, & Ratnasari, 2018). The lack of experimental activities is a direct consequence of these misconceptions (Mohammed Chekour, Laafou, & Janati-Idrissi, 2015b). In this case, simulation is presented as a “unique” didactic tool to overcome the problems generated experiments that require long, dangerous or costly manipulations (Mohammed Chekour, 2018). Also, traditional teaching methods are largely responsible for the low level of Moroccan students in the physics sciences and especially in electricity (Mohammed Chekour, Laafou, & Janati-Idrissi, 2018). To remedy this problem, we will review, in this chapter, the literature of the main pedagogical approaches used to facilitate the acquisition of phenomena of electricity and specially the historical investigation approach based on collaborative learning. Also, we will highlight the added value of the combination of the historical investigation approach and simulation of phenomena of electricity. As a final point, we will present a general scenario of the integration of simulation in the teaching of the electricity concepts with the historical investigation approach.