Electrical Circuit
Electricity and Magnetism

Thinking about actions to take: Setting Up Electrical Loops

Teaching Guidance for 14-16 Supporting Physics Teaching

There's a good chance you could improve your teaching if you were to:

Try these

  • Using and sharing an effective toolkit for thinking about circuits that allows you to make predictions
  • Connecting thinking about your toolkit to choices made in assembling circuits on the benchtop
  • interpreting equations as relationships between physical quantities
  • giving a physical interpretation to equations
  • using a range of representations to relate physical quantities (diagrams, words, mathematics, apparatus)

Teacher Tip: Work through the Physics Narrative to find these lines of thinking worked out and then look in the Teaching Approaches for some examples of activities.

Avoid these

  • encouraging the dash to the formula
  • using triangles to rearrange equations
  • relying on rote substitutions into formulae
  • using an incoherent set of ad-hoc rules and metaphors, each of restricted validity

Teacher Tip: These difficulties are distilled from: the research findings; the practice of well-connected teachers with expertise; issues intrinsic to representing the physics well.

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