Displacement Current: its presentation in textbooks and students̓ understanding of it

Abstract

A generic case study as that defined by (Merriam, 1998) is presented here. In the first part of the work, an analysis of how college-level textbooks address the concept of displacement current was carried out. The analysis was guided by Alexander’s and Kulikowich’s (1994). The results show that in most textbooks: a) the translation between the symbolic and the linguistic system is very limited or not sufficiently precise, b) when the equality between the Displacement Current and the Conduction Current is set, its validity is not stated, and c) some examples of work with an electric field that has a linear variation in time while this case has not been previously treated. The second part of this work deals with the understanding that college students acquire about Displacement Current from different textbooks. This work shows that serious deficiencies can be detected in their interpretation of the selected texts.