Assessing Understanding of the Energy Concept in Different Science Disciplines

Abstract

Energy is one of the most central and richly connected ideas across all science disciplines. The purpose of this study was to develop a measurement instrument for assessing students’ understanding of the energy concept within and across different science disciplines. To achieve this goal, the Inter‐Disciplinary Energy concept Assessment (IDEA) was developed through a pilot test, consisting of 49 items presented in pairs: multiple‐choice questions followed by open‐ended justification questions. The IDEA was administered to 356 college students in the United States. The partial credit Rasch model was applied to establish evidence of validity and reliability of measures for the IDEA. Results showed that the IDEA can produce reliable and valid measures of student understanding of the energy concept in different science disciplines. No statistical difference was found between the average difficulties of items across disciplines. In addition, the four science disciplines were positively correlated in terms of student understanding of the energy concept. When item difficulties were analyzed by science content topics, it was found that students have difficulty in understanding the energy concept in atomic structure, wave, electric and magnetic energy, and modern physics content areas. This result suggests that students’ difficulty in understanding the energy concept is compounded with specific science contents.

How Do Students Understand Energy in Biology, Chemistry, and Physics? Development and Validation of an Assessment Instrument

“…Hence, knowledge integration in students' energy understanding likely varies with the structure of the educational system. With respect to energy understanding in different disciplines, Park and Liu (2016) showed that college students' discipline-specific subsets of energy understanding are highly related, especially between physics and chemistry (biology-chemistry: r = .79; biology-physics: r = .77; chemistry-physics: r = .91). These findings indicate that energy understanding across disciplines is either built on one energy conceptualisation that is consistently applied to varying contexts, or, that students' energy understanding is generally vague, possibly based on alternative conceptions from everyday language, and therefore highly related between disciplines.…”

“…(ii) In addition, it has been concluded that learners are likely challenged by connecting energy knowledge across topics from different disciplines, thus potentially making it difficult for learners to use energy in the sense of a crosscutting concept (Eisenkraft et al, 2014). However, few empirical insights describe how students' progressing energy understanding in different disciplinary contexts is interconnected (Hirça et al, 2008;Lancor, 2015;Park and Liu, 2016). Specifically, research has widely overlooked cross-disciplinary energy learning in middle school and high school.…”

“…A more robust empirical basis in this field is important for the development of energy learning progressions and the strengthening of coherence in energy instruction across topics and school science subjects (Fortus et al, 2015). (iii) When this study was conducted, no test instrument for the systematic comparison of middle/high school students' progressing energy understanding across different disciplinary contexts was available (for a recent and valuable addition to this field, see Park and Liu, 2016). Earlier instruments focus on single disciplinary contexts (e.g.…”

“…Likewise, little insight is available into the systematic assessment and comparison of middle school students' progressing energy understanding across different disciplinary contexts (cf. Park & Liu, 2016). Due to the discipline-specific scope of most prior studies, a test instrument for a respective study was not yet available when our study was conducted (Neumann et al, 2013;Jin & Anderson, 2012;Liu and McKeough, 2005).…”

Concepciones de alumnado de secundaria sobre energía. Una experiencia de Aprendizaje Basado en Proyectos con globos aerostáticos

“…Esta transversalidad lo convierte en un concepto clave, pues permite conectar estos distintos campos que de otro modo podrían parecer al alumnado interpretaciones parciales e inconexas del mundo. Sin embargo es un término poco comprendido por el alumnado (Martínez y Rivadulla, 2015), que suele otorgarle un carácter má-gico o desarrollar concepciones erróneas, a menudo debidas a confusiones entre el término científico y sus expresiones coloquiales (Lijnse, 1990;Millar, 2015) o incluso entre los distintos significados y usos en los campos científicos en que participa, especialmente cuando se trata de campos como la estructura atómica, las ondas, la electricidad y el magnetismo (Lancor, 2014;Park y Liu, 2016). Incluso personas adultas con formación académica muestran dificultades respecto al concepto científico de energía (Núñez et al, 2005) o su capacidad de identificarla en diversos contextos (Rodríguez y García, 2011).…”