Previous literature about students' understanding of heat and temperature primarily emphasizes students' misunderstandings of canonical physics concepts. In our study, we used a resources-oriented approach to analyze 653 student responses to questions about thermal phenomena, looking for ways in which their responses could serve as valuable resources for continued learning. We identified three common conceptual resources: (A) heat transfer is directional; (B) an object's physical properties matter in thermal processes; and (C) hotter objects have more energy. These resources could be used to strengthen physics teaching by using students' understandings of heat and temperature to support the development of more advanced physics ideas.
Much existing physics education research (PER) on student ideas about momentum focuses on the difficulties that students face when learning this topic. These difficulties are framed as obstacles for students to overcome in order to develop correct understandings of physics. Our research takes a resources-oriented approach to analyzing student responses to momentum questions, viewing student ideas as valuable and potentially productive for learning, over and above their correctness. Here, we highlight four conceptual resources that provide insight into students' ideas about momentum, which are the conservation resource, direction resource, collisions resource and properties resource. These resources are context-dependent and could be elicited and built on by instructors to support students in developing more complex and sophisticated understandings of physics.
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