Resumen de Engineering Students’ Fluid Mechanics Misconceptions: a description and theoretical explanation
Shane A. Brown, Kacey Beddoes, Devlin Montfort, Anne Baghdanov
Even after formal instruction, students struggle with concepts in fluid mechanics, including situations involving pipelineswith a changing diameter. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the misconceptions and reasoning that students have withpressurized pipeline flow. Using interview data from three different cohorts of students, this article addresses the followingquestions: (1) How do students conceptualize pressurized pipeline flow? (2) What misconceptions do they have and howcan those misconceptions be explained by existing conceptual change theories? (3) Are those misconceptions consistentacross multiple participant groups with varying levels of experience in fluid mechanics and across different problem sets?Answering these questions provides insight into an appropriate theory of conceptual change, which will in turn helpinstructors achieve conceptualchange in the classroom. Itis theorized that a combinationof an ontological shifttheory and‘‘framework theory’’ provides a more complete understanding of students’ misconceptions in fluid mechanics, andprovides suggestions on how to implement schema training and active learning to facilitate conceptual change.
