Student understanding of energy: Difficulties related to systems

American Journal of Physics

Volumn 80, Issue 2, 2012, Pages 154-163

  Lindsey, Beth A ^a   Heron, Paula R L ^b   Shaffer, Peter S ^b  

^a PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84856196932     PISSN: 00029505     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1119/1.3660661     Document Type: Article

References (30)

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2. Work and changes in kinetic energy" and "Conservation of energy. Tutorials in Introductory Physics The curricular materials consisted of a sequence of two tutorials on work and energy, They will be included in the 2nd edition of (see Ref. 3 for the 1st edition.).
3. McDermott L.C. Shaffer P.S. Tutorials in Introductory Physics 2002, the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington, and (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ).
4. Shaffer P.S. McDermott L.C. Research as a guide for curriculum development: An example from introductory electricity. Part II: Design of an instructional strategy. Am. J. Phys. 1992, 60(11):1003-1013. 10.1119/1.16979, Details about the tutorials and the environment in which they are used can be found in.
5. Wosilait K. Heron P.R. L. Shaffer P.S. McDermott L.C. Development and assessment of a research-based tutorial on light and shadow. Am. J. Phys. 1998, 66(10):906-913. 10.1119/1.18988, More details about the TA seminar can be found in.
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7. Chabay R.W. Sherwood B.A. Modern mechanics. Am. J. Phys. 2004, 72(4):439-445. 10.1119/1.1646134.
8. Jewett J.W. Jewett J.W. Jewett J.W. Energy and the confused student III: Language. Phys. Teach. 2008, 46:149-153. 10.1119/1.2823999, 10.1119/1.2834527, 10.1119/1.2840978, A series of articles in The Physics Teacher provides a summary of many of these ideas. The first three articles in the series are particularly relevant. These are.
9. Articles 2 and 3 in Ref. 8 provide a particularly accessible summary of some of these issues.
10. Van Heuvelen A. Zou X. Multiple representations of work-energy processes. Am. J. Phys. 2001, 69(2):184-194. 10.1119/1.1286662.
11. Loverude M.E. Kautz C.H. Heron P.R. L. Student understanding of the first law of thermodynamics: Relating work to the adiabatic compression of an ideal gas. Am. J. Phys. 2002, 70(2):137-148. 10.1119/1.1417532.
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14. McDermott and L.C. Redish E.F. Resource Letter: PER-1: Physics education research. Am. J. Phys. 1999, 67(9):755-767. 10.1119/1.19122, A more complete listing of articles relating to work and energy in a thermodynamic sense, particularly to student understanding of heat and temperature, can be found in.
15. Ding L. Designing an energy assessment to evaluate student understanding of energy topics. 2007, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Physics, North Carolina State University.
16. Chabay R.W. Sherwood B.A. Matter and Interactions 2010, and 3rd ed. (John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ).
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18. Papadouris N. Constantinou C.P. Kyratsi T. Goldring H. Osborne J. Students' difficulties with energy and related concepts. Phys. Educ. 1994, 29(1):26-32. 10.1002/tea.20235, 10.1002/tea.v45:4, In addition to the articles we have described, there exists a vast literature on the learning and teaching of energy at the precollege level. Some representative articles include and.
19. Christensen W.M. Meltzer D.E. Ogilvie C.A. Student ideas regarding entropy and the second law of thermodynamics in an introductory physics course. Am. J. Phys. 2009, 77(10):907-917. 10.1119/1.3167357.
20. Students were given credit for completing the pretest, regardless of the correctness of their answers. They had 15 min to complete the entire pretest and were free to consult textbooks and the web during that time. Based on the reasoning provided in student responses, we believe that access to these resources did not affect student responses significantly.
21. On some of the questions we have described, we have seen variations larger than is typical. To give a sense of these variations, in the tables we report values as the mean across several classes, with error bars that represent the 95% confidence interval based on the score variances.
22. BS = δK were treated identically regardless of whether students had identified the quantities as positive or negative.
23. Students were also given the option of stating that it was not possible to determine the sign of each of these quantities. These data are not included in the table because in every case, fewer than 5% of the students chose this option.
24. Although students had been asked only to write one equation, many wrote more than one. The tables indicate the percentage of students writing each equation, not the percentage of equations written. Thus the percentages in the tables sum to more than 100%.
25. About 20% of the students wrote this equation. About 15% of all students had indicated elsewhere that each of the terms in the equation is nonzero.
26. We observed a larger spread in percentages of students giving the double-counting response on the block-Earth equations problem than is typical in our research. (The percentage ranged from 18% to 32% across three samples.) This result suggests that further research on this topic is needed.
27. This last response is similar to the results reported in Ref. 19 in which students experienced similar scale-related difficulties when asked about the change in entropy of an object and its (much larger) surroundings.
28. Mazur E. Peer Instruction: A User's Manual 2007, Clicker questions are multiple-choice questions to which students respond in real time using hand-held personal response systems, or clickers. Clicker questions are used for formative assessment of student understanding as well as to promote interactive engagement in the classroom. For more information on this technique, see (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ).
29. Halliday D. Resnick R. Walker J. Fundamentals of Physics 2011, See, for example, and 9th ed. (John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ).
30. Moore T.A. Six Ideas That Shaped Physics, Unit C: Conservation Laws Constrain Motion 2003, 2nd ed. (McGraw-Hill, New York).