Supporting Middle School Students' Development of an Accurate and Applicable Energy Concept.
Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: Energy is a fundamental unifying concept of science, yet common approaches to energy instruction in middle school have shown little success with helping students develop their naïve ideas about energy into more sophisticated understandings that are useful for making sense of their experiences. While traditional approaches to energy focus on performing calculations in idealized systems, our development team produced a new middle school energy unit that focuses qualitatively on the energy transformations that occur in everyday, non-idealized, systems. This approach uses project-based pedagogy to contextualize instruction with the driving question, How can I use trash to power my stereo? In this study, I investigate the effectiveness of our approach by tracking 8th grade students conceptual development during the unit, following up with students who participated in the unit a year previously, and comparing the energy conceptions and content knowledge between energy unit participants and older students in the same school who learned about energy in an approach that did not emphasize energy transformations in non-idealized systems. Results indicate that during instruction, students energy conceptions progress from a set of disconnected ideas toward a coherent understanding that is organized around the principle of transformation. After instruction, students who participated in the energy unit were generally more capable of using their understanding of energy to make sense of everyday scenarios than were older non-participants. Furthermore, 9th grade students who participated in the energy unit in their 8th grade year continued to develop more sophisticated understandings of energy during their 9th grade biology course. These 9th grade students seemed better prepared to learn about energy content in their biology course than 10th graders, who did not participate in the energy unit, but took the same biology course during their 9th grade year. Overall, my results suggest that middle school curricula can have a more meaningful and lasting impact on students energy conceptions and content knowledge by focusing qualitatively on energy transformations that occur in familiar, non-idealized systems.
Author: Jeffrey Nordine
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2139168333