Students' abilities to solve RC circuits with research-based educational strategies

One of the main research lines of Physics Education Research is students' conceptual understanding. Since the'70s, that line of research has produced not only research papers but also educational material that helps instructors teach physics in a coherent and structured way so that students can understand physics better. We have applied several of these research-based materials in our electricity and magnetism course for physics engineering students and have obtained good results regarding learning gain measured by some standard tests. In this paper, we focus on the effect of students' understanding of physics concepts on their problem-solving ability from a quantitative perspective. We chose RC circuits given the lack of time devoted to problem-solving in the class on this topic. The results indicate that even though students understand basic concepts such as potential difference, current, capacitance, and resistance, they struggle when trying to apply those concepts to solving RC circuits problems. On the other hand, we also show that students with good quantitative results, at the same time, have good qualitative results.