Topographic maps and electrostatics: How what we don’t teach affects what we teach

Electrostatics is often the first truly abstract topic that students encounter in first year physics. The building blocks of the theory, the electrostatic potential and the electric field, are not tangible, require visualizing in three dimensions, and involve a deep calculus relationship between vectors (the electric field) and scalars (the electric potential). Topographic maps (specifically the contours) are a natural analogy for electrostatics. They remove a layer of abstraction by involving tangible things like mountains and valleys, but still require 3D visualization and the deep mathematical relationship between elevation and slope. However, the analogy suffers two things 1) not many students have prior experience with using topographic maps for navigation anymore and 2) it has become apparent that even for those who need to use topographic maps (geologists), they are hard to interpret. The full scope of our study focuses on 3 research questions: Does prior knowledge of topographic maps lead to a better understanding of electrostatics after one semester of instruction? Can we measure far transfer in the spatial reasoning skills required for reading topographic maps and doing electrostatics. Can we use what we know from spatial reasoning research on topographic maps to inform us how to teach electrostatics better? We will present pre/post data (N = 65) of a survey given to a first-year physics class at University of XXX. The survey contains relevant subsets of the Map Experience Survey (MEP), Topographic Map Assessment (TMA), Comparative Measures in Electromagnetism Survey (CMES), and the Mental Rotations Test (MRT).