A study of undergraduate physics students' understanding of heat conduction based on mental model theory and an ontology–process analysis

Abstract

This study first used a new approach, combining students' ontological beliefs and process explanations, to represent students' mental models of heat conduction and then examined the relationships between their mental models and their predictions. Clinical interviews were conducted to probe 30 undergraduate physics students' mental models and their predictions about heat conduction. This study adopted a constant comparative method to discover patterns of the participants' responses across the various sources of data, such as verbal utterances, writings, and drawings. The results indicate that, based on the identified five process analogies for how heat is conducted and three ontological beliefs about the material basis for heat conduction, the combinations of these two aspects can better represent their mental models in terms of both the underlying mechanisms and emergent processes of heat conduction than using either alone as has sometimes been done in prior research. In addition, while a scientifically accepted mental model had a better

Investigating students’ mental models about the quantization of light, energy, and angular momentum

“…For example, while it is possible to see how students organize their knowledge over a period of time using qualitative investigations [10,12,14,15,19,[23][24][25]27], a simultaneous examination of many students' mental models within a limited time span is possible with technology assisted quantitative investigations [11,20,26]. In addition, some of the designs use both approaches sequentially [13,18,21].…”

Synthesis of discipline-based education research in physics

“…Another thrust in research on students' conceptual understanding attempts to describe the cognitive architecture of conceptual knowledge (i.e., how conceptual knowledge is structured in memory). This body of work has generated lively debate among those proposing different cognitive architectures [18][19][20][21][22][23], and some have combined different types of cognitive architectures to explain student reasoning [24]. An interesting emerging line of work in misconceptions uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the nature of conceptual change; preliminary findings suggest that even when students know the right answers (i.e., when they have supposedly overcome their misconceptions) brain activation suggests that many students may still hold the misconception in memory yet suppress it [25].…”

Teaching About Thermal Phenomena and Thermodynamics: The Contribution of the History and Philosophy of Science

“…Chiou and Anderson (2010) characterise four patterns of students' interpretative frameworks of heat: first, heat is treated as an intrinsic property of a substance (wood is hot, ice is cold); second, hotness and coldness are treated as material substances which can move from one object to another; third, heat is treated as a nonmaterial entity, caloric flow, which propagates from objects at higher temperatures to objects at lower temperatures; and fourth, a scientifically acceptable view, in which heat refers to a transfer of energy due to a temperature difference. According to the authors, 'The sequence of these four frameworks also represents the developmental stages of peoples' conceptions of heat, developing from a naive view toward a more scientific one'.…”