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Because of this, and despite the fact that it is common practice, it is sort of a mistake to find the resistance of a circuit element by plotting V vs I and finding the slope. Obviously, if the circuit element is non-ohmic it doesn’t make any sense to report a single R value. However, even if the circuit element can be nicely approximated by Ohm’s Law, it actually makes more sense to report the value of R as an average of all V/I ratios than it does to calculate the resistance by determining the slope of the best fit line.  This is especially the case if your best fit-line has a non-zero y-intercept.

Students in inquiry often think its “cheating” to go look online for information, or they think I want them to completely disregard information they look up. I don’t think they need to go look up information, but I’m happy if they do. Really, I just want them to treat ideas they read online no differently than they do ideas they hear from class. Those ideas are subject to our scrutiny, to our questioning; and we should concern ourselves with whether those ideas help us to build an explanation, or whether those ideas are merely providing scientific jargon.