Prior research suggests that students who cannot light a bulb given a single wire, a bulb, and a battery are not able to reason correctly regarding complete circuits. Our research shows that students believe that the wires from the filament are connected to the base of the bulb at the bottom. The percentage of students with this belief seems to be dependent on the level of the introductory physics course taken (conceptual, algebra, calculus). We have proposed three activities that appear to aid students in developing the correct model of how a light bulb is wired and a definition of complete circuit that classifies a short circuit as a complete circuit but one that is not advantageous.
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Engelhardt et al. (2004) studied this question.
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