Electric circuits study through students drawings: a pedagogic strategy to make explicit the conceptual difficulties

This article proposes to incorporate the language of the drawings to the traditional conventional symbolism used in the study of electrical circuits. The objective is to work this representation mode with High School students together with the scientific language. We show that the pictorial mode, that doesn t demand the knowledge of the official codes, has the potential to detect students conceptual difficulties, preventing them from being hidden by the abstract and anti-intuitive official symbolism. The idea is to permit that learners, during the learning process, may express themselves through direct and intuitive symbols, instead of being forced to use exclusively the norms and codes from official semiotics, as it has been traditionally done. We will see that the instructional modality based on the students drawings allows a rich opportunity for the teacher to generate discussions and to keep up with the construction of his/her student knowledge in classroom.