Abstract
There are so many educational research projects devoted to energy teaching at all school levels, that it may seem hard to add something original and relevant. However, the persistent difficulties documented by both teachers and students in this area show that there is still a great need for coherence and consistency in its presentation, in particular in an interdisciplinary perspective. This paper collects materials made available at the beginning of the seminar for the joint debate on energy teaching. Section “Introduction” presents the motivation and a general look at the energy teaching; section “The Proposal and the Theoretical Background” is devoted to four ideas suggested as a starting point for the discussion; in section “Experiments” concrete experiments are sketched, illustrating how the proposed approach to energy naturally enhances the interconnections between different aspects of natural phenomena and permits students’ introduction to dynamical modelling activities (more thoroughly presented in a poster session report). While it was not possible to enter in the specific context of the various proposals outlined during the seminar discussions, some aspects were discussed in depth, and will form part of the report on the discussion of the working group.
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Notes
- 1.
This situation is interesting also because, as pointed out years ago by Alonso (1994), the introduction of modern physics in the courses should not be done just adding some appealing topic at the end. Rather, a modernisation occurs introducing the fundamental results emerged in the research in more modern topics also in the classical fields: in this case the general and fundamental relationship between symmetries and conservations laws. This operation may require a deep rethinking of the conceptual structure both at a disciplinary and at a didactical level, but opens up to important new perspectives that can be of great help for our students.
- 2.
It is interesting to note that students, looking at the accelerated toy car, naturally ask where the linear momentum comes from, as well as they are able to individuate the surface on which the car is moving as the second physical system involved in the mechanical exchange.
- 3.
Process diagrams are of particular interest since in nature one process drives often another process, sometimes creating long chains. For a detailed introduction see for example Fuchs (2010).
- 4.
Probably not for those students who are happy to have a formula to enter numbers in, but rather for those who wish to understand, capture the inconsistencies and who therefore, unfortunately, often think they do not understand.
- 5.
As well known, only the “interaction term” of the total field energy can be interpreted as the potential energy of the system. However, in spite of what is considered by certain authors (see (Hilborn 2014), difficulties of this type do not seem to me a motivation for abandoning the idea of introducing fields as real physical systems already in high school.
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D’Anna, M. (2018). Addressing Some Common Difficulties in Teaching and Learning Energy in High School. In: Sokołowska, D., Michelini, M. (eds) The Role of Laboratory Work in Improving Physics Teaching and Learning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96184-2_15
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