I am an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Middle Tennessee State University (@brianwfrank on twitter), where I teach physics, prepare future physics teachers, and carryout research related to the teaching and learning of physics.
I blog here about physics, physics education, and physics education research. An archive of older posts lives at teachbrianteach.blogspot.com. I also blog about family child care at https://playbrianplay.wordpress.com and I have started recently posting videos to my youtube channel.
Hi Brian, I’ve been reading over some of your older posts about understanding current on a conceptual level (this week, a whole new bunch of first year students will wrestle with “but something gets used up…” or at least I hope they will). I noticed that in this post you talked about a paper describing children’s mental models of electricity, and in this one you mentioned a reading about argumentation. Are those available, either publicly or by subscription? I’m curious to check them out and see how/if they might be helpful to me or my students. Any pointers appreciated.
The reading on mental model of electricity, for now, is online: Chapter 15 from Making Sense of Secondary Science by Driver et al
The argumentation paper was a chapter from, “Ready Set Science!”which is also now and forever free.
Thanks a bunch, Brian. I will take a closer look. By the way, would you consider putting a “search” widget on your blog? I often come back looking for things they they can be hard to find, and the WordPress search box searches all of WordPress.com…