We report on an investigation of student understanding of the first law of thermodynamics. The students involved were drawn from first-year university physics courses and a second-year thermal physics course. The emphasis was on the ability of the students to relate the first law to the adiabatic compression of an ideal gas. Although they had studied the first law, few students recognized its relevance. Fewer still were able to apply the concept of work to account for a change in temperature in an adiabatic process. Instead most of the students based their predictions and explanations on a misinterpretation of the ideal gas law. Even when ideas of energy and work were suggested, many students were unable to give a correct analysis. They frequently failed to differentiate the concepts of heat, temperature, work, and internal energy. Some of the difficulties that students had in applying the concept of work in a thermal process seemed to be related to difficulties with mechanics. Our findings also suggest that a misinterpretation of simple microscopic models may interfere with student ability to understand macroscopic phenomena. Implications for instruction in thermal physics and in mechanics are discussed.

Our findings from a long-term investigation indicate that many students cannot properly interpret or apply the ideal gas law after instruction in introductory physics and chemistry as well as more advanced courses. The emphasis in this paper is on the concepts of pressure, volume, and temperature at the macroscopic level. We describe some serious conceptual and reasoning difficulties that we have identified. Results from our research were applied in the design of a curriculum that has helped improve student understanding of the ideal gas law.

This paper is the first of two that describe how research on student understanding of Archimedes’ principle is being used to guide the development of instructional materials on this topic. Our results indicate that standard instruction on hydrostatics leaves many science and engineering majors unable to predict and explain the sinking and floating behavior of simple objects. A number of serious and persistent difficulties with the concepts and principles used to analyze such behavior are identified. Although some of these difficulties are specific to the concept of the buoyant force, many others seem to reflect lingering confusion about concepts that are widely assumed to be understood by students before the study of hydrostatics begins.

This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Upper Division Physics Courses.] As part of an ongoing project to examine student learning in upper-division courses in thermal and statistical physics, we have examined student reasoning about entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. We have examined reasoning in terms of heat transfer, entropy maximization, and statistical treatments of multiplicity and probability. In this paper, we describe student responses in interviews focused on the approach of macroscopic systems to thermal equilibrium. Our data suggest that students do not use a single simple model of entropy, but rather use a variety of conceptual resources. Individual students frequently shifted between resources, in some cases leading to contradictory predictions. Among the resources that students employed were some that have been previously described in the literature, including inappropriate use of conservation. However, our results suggest that student use of resources connected to disorder are neither simple nor monolithic. For example, many students used a previously unreported association between the equilibrium state of a system and an increase in order, rather than disorder.

This paper is the second of two that describe how research on student understanding of Archimedes’ principle is being used to guide the development of instructional materials to supplement instruction on this topic in typical introductory courses. The instructional materials that resulted have proven to be effective. Also discussed are instructional materials for special courses and workshops for K–8 teachers. Evidence is presented that, on some tasks, teachers who have worked through these materials perform much better than introductory physics students.