M. next, Excuse me please for my error in post #6 above when I suggested you "Just forget current arrows, they will only confuse you. It is NOT important to understand electronics."
As technician points out, this is not how to help folks who are beginning their study of electricity. There have been multiple threads here on PF exactly about this concept. I offer two sources that describe the "diirection of current flow" for you.
“In metallic solids, electricity flows by means of electrons, from lower to higher electrical potential. In other media, any stream of charged objects may constitute an electric current. To provide a definition of current that is independent of the type of charge carriers flowing, conventional current is defined to flow in the same direction as positive charges. So in metals where the charge carriers (electrons) are negative, conventional current flows in the opposite direction as the electrons. In conductors where the charge carriers are positive, conventional current flows in the same direction as the charge carriers.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_current
“…the misconception that "Electricity" is made of negatively-charged particles called electrons. This fundamental error leads most people to imagine that electric currents are always a flow of negative particles. Actually, in some conductors the electric currents are a flow of genuinely positive charges, while in others the flows are indeed negative particles. And sometimes the currents are both positive and negative particles flowing at once, but in opposite directions within the same conductor. We cannot arbitrarily decide which way the charges flow, since their true direction always depends on the type of conductive material.
To gain some insight, let's examine the details. When trying to understand electric circuits and electrical measurements, we need a simple way to take measurements of the important entity named Electric Current. But to measure currents, won't we first need to measure how much of the current is composed negative particles going one way, and positive particles the other? Yes, but we ONLY need this if we want to know EVERYTHING about the electric current. The flowing negatives and positives are usually not equal, and the speed of the positives in one direction is usually not the same as the speed of the negatives in the other. Electric current can be complicated! However, there is a cute trick we can pull in order to avoid having to look at the particles at all. And that trick holds the answer to the question.
Electric currents produce three main effects: magnetism, heating, and the voltage drop across resistive conductors. These three effects cover almost everything we encounter in electronics. And these three effects don't care about the amounts of positive and negative particles, or about their speed, their mass, their charge, etc. If a hundred positive particles flow to the left per second, this gives EXACTLY as much magnetism, heating, and voltage as a hundred NEGATIVE particles flowing to the right per second. (Note: this is because reversing the polarity of the particles reverses the current, and reversing the particle direction reverses the current again! Two negatives make a positive.) Magnetism, heating, and voltage drop together represent nearly every feature that's important in everyday electrical circuitry. THEREFORE, AS FAR AS MOST ELECTRICAL DEVICES AND CIRCUITS ARE CONCERNED, IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE IF THE CURRENT IS MADE OF POSITIVE PARTICLES GOING ONE WAY, OR NEGATIVE PARTICLES GOING THE OTHER... OR HALF AS MANY NEGATIVES FLOWING BACKWARDS THROUGH A CROWD OF HALF AS MANY POSITIVES.
PUT SIMPLY, THE "AMPERE" DOESN'T CARE ABOUT THE DIRECTION OR SPEED OF THE FLOWING PARTICLES. (upper case mine)
So, in order to simplify our measurements and our mental picture of Electric Currents, we cut away the unused parts of the picture. We make the negative particles positive, then add their current to any positive particles which were flowing forward. We stop thinking of current as being a flow of charges. Instead we intentionally define "electric current" as being a flow of exclusively positive particles flowing in one particular direction. We don't care about the real polarity of the particles. We don't care about their speed, and we don't care about their number. We ignore both the chemical effects and the effects of the velocity and direction moving particles. We ignore the collisions between positive and negative particles. All we care about is the total net charge which moves past a particular point in the circuit. The real charges are too complicated to deal with, and the added complexity gets us very little information as long as we're only interested in voltage drop, magnetic fields, and heating.”
http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/amateur/elecdir.html
