Energy and its carriers

Abstract

Reports on the first course of a new physics curriculum developed at the Karlsruhe Institute for the Didactics of Physics (Falk and Herrmann 1977, 1978, 1979, 1981). The entire curriculum begins at the elementary school level with children aged 10-12 and is intended to extend beyond high school and through university studies (Falk and Ruppel 1975, 1976). Energy is introduced as the primary quantity at the very beginning of the course. It is not 'derived' from other seemingly more fundamental quantities such as mass, displacement, velocity and force. However, the course is not an ad hoc construction simply to explain the concept of energy. The essential features of many natural and technological processes can be understood by considering the flow of energy. This is the basic idea underlying the course, and can be restated more completely in terms of the following rule: 'something is happening whenever energy is flowing and a flow of energy is always accompanied by the flow of at least one other substance-like quantity'. The course strategy is designed to make this simple rule obvious by way of numerous examples taken from everyday life. Selected topics are highlighted and they introduce concepts unique to the authors approach. These concepts are presented in the same chronological order as they appear in the course.

Conceptual Metaphor Meets Conceptual Change

“…A more comprehensive attempt to conceive of a continuous learning trajectory between the naïve and scientific concept of energy has involved a proposal to reconceptualize the scientific concept itself as a substance-like entity for pedagogical purposes [Duit, 1987;Schmidt, 1982]. Schmidt [1982] reports on a comprehensive approach to teaching physics from this perspective.…”

“…Schmidt [1982] reports on a comprehensive approach to teaching physics from this perspective. In this approach, energy is seen as a substance-like entity that: can be contained and thereby stored in some system; can flow from some source to a receiver; this flow is via some other substance-like entity which can be referred to as a 'carrier'; when a substance is received into some con-tainer it can then function as a source, thereby functioning as a point in a chain of energy exchanges.…”

Understanding why things happen: Case-studies of pupils using an abstract picture language to represent the nature of changes

“…Indeed, in both its everyday use and the way it is used in many school textbooks, the term is much closer in meaning to the scientific concept of free energy than the concept of energy. This has caused much confusion and stimulated a great deal of debate about these issues (e.g., Duit, 1981;Schmid, 1982;Warren, 1982;Marx, 1983;Driver & Millar, 1986;Ellse, 1988;Ross, 1988;Solomon, 1992). Research into children's ideas about energy suggests that their starting point is that energy represents a power to act which is used up and may be refreshed (e.g., Watts, 1983;Solomon, 1984).…”

‘Conceptual Metaphor Meets Conceptual Change’: Yes to Embodiment, No to Fragmentation

“…He discussed proposals by some science education scholars like Duit [1987] and Schmidt [1982] to teach the scientific concept of energy as a substance-like entity in order to close the gap between students' initial conceptions of energy and the abstract, mathematical concept of energy, and the limitations of such an analogy-based approach [e.g., Lijnse, 1990;Warren, 1982Warren, , 1986. He suggested that conceptual metaphor theory can provide insights about how to bootstrap the scientific concept, based on the finding of his analysis that showed a multiplicity of metaphors used to talk about energy in science discourse.…”