APPLICATION OF THE CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING TO IMPROVE THE PERFORMANCE OF STUDENTS IN PHYSICS

The purpose of this study was to promote the conceptual understanding to improve the performance of students from different engineering careers who are registered in a physics course offered by an Ecuadorian public university. The participants were 70 students, aged between 18 and 20 years, who took the subject of Physics. The instructional unit was Kinematic of the particle in one and two dimensions. The time spent on teaching was 16 hours. The instruments were a test related to the unit taught. The procedure followed in this study was as follows: (1) Explain the kinematics of the particle in one and two dimensions, both to the experimental and control group. (2) Presenting the teaching of conceptual understanding only to the experimental group, the control group received the class in a traditional way. (3) Administer the posttest. In this study the independent variable is two-level teaching with conceptual understanding and no conceptual understanding; the dependent variable is student performance. The applied statistical analysis is the Gosset test. This study proved that those students who receive the teaching with conceptual understanding perform better and the results obtained support this hypothesis.