Supporting Students in Using Energy Ideas to Interpret Phenomena: The Role of an Energy Representation

In the sciences, energy is an important idea to get insight into phenomena, as energy can help to reveal hidden systems and processes. However, students commonly struggle to use energy ideas to interpret and explain phenomena. To support students in using energy ideas to interpret and explain phenom...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational journal of science and mathematics education Vol. 18; no. 8; pp. 1635 - 1654
Main Authors Kubsch, Marcus, Nordine, Jeffrey, Fortus, David, Krajcik, Joseph, Neumann, Knut
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Singapore Springer Singapore 01.12.2020
Springer
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Content analysis
Education
Empirical analysis
Energy
Energy transfer
Grade 8
Graphical representations
Graphs
Mathematics Education
Middle School Students
Qualitative analysis
Science Education
Science Process Skills
Secondary School Science
Students
Representation
Energy
Middle school
Cognitive tool
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Summary:In the sciences, energy is an important idea to get insight into phenomena, as energy can help to reveal hidden systems and processes. However, students commonly struggle to use energy ideas to interpret and explain phenomena. To support students in using energy ideas to interpret and explain phenomena, a range of different graphical representations are commonly used. However, there is little empirical research regarding whether and how these representations actually support students’ ability to use energy ideas. Building on common ways of representing energy transfer, we address this issue by exploring whether, and if so how, a specific representation called the energy transfer model (ETM) supports middle school students’ interpretation of phenomena using the idea of energy transfer. We conducted an interview study with N  = 30 8th grade students in a quasi-experimental setting and used qualitative content analysis to investigate student answers. We found evidence that students who construct an ETM when making sense of phenomena consider the role of energy transfers between systems more comprehensively, i.e., they reason about hidden processes and systems to a larger extent than students who do not construct an ETM.
ISSN:1571-0068
1573-1774
DOI:10.1007/s10763-019-10035-y