Improving Student Understanding of Coulomb's Law and Gauss's Law

Abstract

We discuss the development and evaluation of five research-based tutorials on Coulomb's law, superposition, symmetry and Gauss's Law to help students in the calculus-based introductory physics courses learn these concepts. We discuss the performance of students on the pre-/post-tests given before and after the tutorials in three calculus-based introductory physics courses. We also discuss the performance of students who used the tutorials and those who did not use it on a multiple-choice test which employs concepts covered in the tutorials.