Student conceptual resources for understanding electric circuits

Physics Education Research has a rich history of identifying common student ideas about specific physics topics. In the context of electric circuits, existing research on students’ ideas has primarily focused on misconceptions, misunderstandings, and difficulties. In this paper, we take a resource-oriented approach to identifying common student ideas about circuits by characterizing ideas we see as generative “seeds of science” that could form the basis of more sophisticated understandings. Based on our analysis of 1557 university physics student responses to five conceptual questions, we identify four common resources for understanding circuits.