Target Model Sequence and Critical Learning Pathway for an Electricity Curriculum Based on Model Evolution

This chapter discusses the design of a recently developed high school electricity curriculum called the Capacitor-Aided System for Teaching and Learning Electricity (CASTLE), which aspires to enable students to construct a sequence of increasingly complex qualitative models of electric circuits (Steinberg & Wainwright, 1993). The curriculum is driven by hands-on student experiments on bulb lighting in circuits that contain batteries and capacitors, sequenced to foster a learning pathway of model modifications that add conceptual complexity gradually with low cognitive load. The growing complexity periodically requires a revised conception of causal agency. The transition from emission by a battery to pressure in a compressible fluid as the agent of current propulsion is described here. Transitions to increasingly abstract causal agents of distant action will be described in a later chapter in this volume. Teacher and student manuals with complete details are available in Electricity Visualized (Steinberg et al., 2007).