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Teaching Energy Concepts by Working on Themes of Cultural and Environmental Value

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Abstract

Energy is a central topic in physics and a key concept for understanding the physical, biological and technological worlds. It is a complex topic with multiple connections with different areas of science and with social, environmental and philosophical issues. In this paper we discuss some aspects of the teaching and learning of the energy concept, and report results of research on this issue. To immerse science teaching into the context of scientific culture and of the students’ cultural world, we propose to select specific driving issues that promote motivation for the construction of science concepts and models. We describe the design and evaluation of a teaching learning path developed around the issue of greenhouse effect and global warming. The experimentation with high school students has shown that the approach based on driving issues promotes students’ engagement toward a deeper understanding of the topic and favours further insight. The evolution of students’ answers indicates a progressively more correct and appropriate use of the concepts of heat, radiation, temperature, internal energy, a distinction between thermal equilibrium and stationary non equilibrium conditions, and a better understanding of greenhouse effect. Based on the results of the experimentation and in collaboration with the teachers involved, new materials for the students have been prepared and a new cycle of implementation, evaluation and refinement has been activated with a larger group of teachers and students. This type of systematic and long term collaboration with teachers can help to fill the gap between the science education research and the actual school practice.

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Notes

  1. See for example (Shayer and Wylam 1981; Solomon 1983; Watts 1983; Erickson and Tiberghien 1985; Duit 1986).

  2. See for example (Goldring and Osborne 1994; Loverude et al. 2002; Meltzer 2004; Rozier and Viennot 1991).

  3. As an example: “In this process… two electrons become pure energy because they annihilate with positrons (anti-electrons)… As a spirit animating what exists around us, energy is in everything, sometimes tangible as the Sun light, sometimes hidden in remote corner of reality… All bodies producing a field are subjected to its action, thus all bodies, being no more than energy lumps, interact gravitationally the one with the other” (translated by the authors from De Felice F. (2000), pp. 13, 23, 24).

  4. The term was coined by Z. Rant in 1956, resuming some ideas introduced by Gibbs.

  5. See Stavy and Berkovitz (1980), Shayer and Wylam (1981), Erickson and Tiberghien (1985), Arnold and Millar (1996), Cotignola et al. (2002), De Berg (2008).

  6. See Guesne (1985), Andersson and Kärrqvist (1983), Kaminski (1989), and Chauvet (1996).

  7. See Boyes and Stanisstreet (1993), Rye et al. (1997), Groves and Pugh (1999), Koulaidis and Christidou (1999), Meadows and Wiesenmayer (1999), Andersson and Wallin (2000), Papadimitriou (2004), Osterlind (2005), Lester et al. (2006), Kilinc et al. (2008), Svihla and Linn (2012).

  8. See for instance Lester et al. (2006), Cordero et al. (2008), Svihla and Linn (2012).

  9. We used the GLX data loggers by PASCO. We also used the metal cylinders, the metal bottles and the plastic box provided by PASCO for the experiments described in the following.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the students and teachers who participated in this work. Research was partly supported by the National Project Piano Lauree Scientifiche (Degrees in Science Project) funded by the Italian Ministry of Education.

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  1. Department of Physics, University of Pavia, Via A. Bassi 6, 27100, Pavia, Italy

    Ugo Besson & Anna De Ambrosis

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  1. Ugo Besson
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Correspondence to Ugo Besson.

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Besson, U., De Ambrosis, A. Teaching Energy Concepts by Working on Themes of Cultural and Environmental Value. Sci & Educ 23, 1309–1338 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-013-9592-7

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