This article presents a study aimed at examining the novice student answers in an introductory programming final e-exam to identify misconceptions and types of errors. Our study used the Delphi concept inventory to identify student misconceptions and skill, rule, and knowledge-based errors approach to identify the types of errors made by novices…

Based on the analysis of available research on students' alternative conceptions about the particulate nature of matter, we identified basic implicit assumptions that seem to constrain students' ideas and reasoning on this topic at various learning stages. Although many of these assumptions are interrelated, some of them seem to change or…

Results of a systematic investigation into university students' (n=236) misunderstandings of d.c. simple circuit operations are reported. These results provide evidence of various misconceptions present before and after teaching the following topics: a battery as a source of constant current; the functional relation expressed by Ohm's law; power…

Students lacking formal training in physics have great difficulty predicting the paths of various projectiles. With respect to pendulum-bobs that are released from various points in a swing, a previous experiment found that empirical feedback (i.e., resultant trajectories) produced transfer-of-training to other pendular-based tasks. However, such…