Productive Disciplinary Engagement about electric circuits using Design-Based Research

Researchers and education professionals agree that educational research is often disconnected from the problems and issues of everyday practice: a division that creates the need for new research approaches that speak directly to the problems of practice and that lead to the development of "usable knowledge". As a consequence of this disconnection between practice and research results, physics classes in Argentina rarely present opportunities for students to get productively engagement in the discipline. In this paper, some results of previous research have been selected for designing an introductory class to electrical circuits for high school. The methodology used is Design-Based Research. The designed class is implemented in 2 groups of 15 students aged 14. In class, the effectiveness of learning is analyzed from the considerations raised by Engle and Conant in 2002, to account for Productive Disciplinary Engagement (PDE). The results show that 1) students engage productively in a disciplinary manner when working with activities designed based on Engle and Conant's 2002 guidelines and, 2) the presence in the class of a student possessing the correct knowledge on the subject addressed, can interfere in the distribution of authority among the class participants and therefore in the degree of PDE reached by all students.