Drawings of energy: Evidence of the Next Generation Science Standards model of energy in diagrams

Abstract

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) provide a succession of objectives for energy learning and set an expectation for teachers to assess learners' representations of energy in a variety of science contexts. To support teachers in evaluating the extent to which representations of energy display NGSS objectives, we have (i) discerned the constituent ideas that comprise the NGSS model of energy in the physical sciences and (ii) developed a checklist for assessing the extent to which an energy diagram provides evidence of the NGSS energy model. This energy diagram checklist is representation independent (so that diverse diagrams in a course may all be evaluated) and scenario independent (so that it can be applied throughout the physical science curriculum). We demonstrate the use of the checklist for assessing both pedagogical energy diagrams and learner-invented energy diagrams, including measuring a class's increased facility with energy diagrams.

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

“…However, such expert representations are not accessible in middle school or lower grades when students lack the mathematical foundations. Therefore, other representations such as energy chains (Papadouris & Constantinou, 2016) or pie charts are introduced (see Gray et al (2019) and Scherr, Close, McKagan, and Vokos (2012) for a review of existing energy representations).…”

“…As the effectiveness of energy representations depends on their alignment to the learning environment (Ametller & Pintó, 2002;Gray et al, 2019;Kim & Reeves, 2007;Scherr et al, 2012), we describe the learning environment used in this study in the next section and then explain how the used energy representation aligns with it.…”

“…Thus, a representation that serves as a cognitive tool in the systems-transfer unit should represent the key ideas of systems, processes, and transfers and help to support students' reasoning processes around those ideas. None of the energy representations in the literature represent all of the ideas that are important to the systems-transfer perspective (see Gray et al, 2019;Scherr et al, 2012). Therefore, building on existing ways to represent energy transfer, we developed a new representation called the energy transfer model (ETM).…”

“…Further, the arrow must always point from one system to another, i.e., it cannot start or end in "nowhere," and for every increasing energy process, there must be a decreasing energy process. This emphasizes the qualitative notion of energy conservation that when the energy of a system changes, there has to be another change in energy in some other system (Gray et al, 2019). Thus, the representation should provide support for reasoning through its graphical elements and via rules.…”

“…In contrast to other central science ideas such as force, there is no consensus representation for energy, and there is little empirical research regarding the actual effectiveness of energy representations in supporting students. While existing representations of energy often emphasize energy as manifest in different forms (Gray, Wittmann, Vokos, & Scherr, 2019), researchers have repeatedly questioned whether forms-based energy instruction is responsible for students' difficulties with energy (Brewe, 2011;Quinn, 2014;Swackhamer, 2005). We investigated whether, and if so how, a specific representationthe energy transfer model (ETM)that emphasizes the unitary nature of energy instead of forms supports middle school students in using energy ideas to make sense of phenomena in a physical science context.…”