A Systematic Review of Student Misconceptions about Electricity and Electric Circuit Concepts

Many students have misconceptions about fundamental engineering concepts that interfere with their ability to accurately grasp more advanced engineering concepts. Misconceptions are particularly ubiquitous in counterintuitive and complex subjects, such as electric circuits. Although several efforts have been directed at diagnosing students' misconceptions of electric circuits and designing instructional approaches for remediating identified misconceptions, there has been no effort to systematically synthesize and summarized the literature on students' misconceptions of electricity and electric circuit concepts.

As such, the purpose of this study, which is a work in progress, is to conduct a systematic literature review of empirical studies that have examined students' misconceptions about electric circuits and electricity concepts. A comprehensive literature search returned 3365 articles, out of which 93 passed the inclusion and exclusion criteria. We randomly selected 17 of the included articles for this work in progress study.

The results of the analysis of the coding show that most of the studies were published between 2011 and 2021, and that about 47% of them focused on college students. Furthermore, the result reveals that most students still believe that battery is a source of constant current. Other results and the implications for this study's findings will be discussed.