Thread by @MarKubsch

Do we need to rethink how students should learn about energy in school? In our latest paper in #DISER we have started to take a closer look at that question. rdcu.be/cegKN
A thread on what we found and why it matters.

The core of the energy concept is really the idea that energy is a conserved quantity. However, students often struggle with that idea. This is maybe not surprising when we consider how often we hear things like energy consumption. #ClimateEmergency

So we looked at students learning in a new curriculum follows the suggestions in the #NGSS #NGSSchat and emphasizes the idea of energy transfer instead of energy forms and transformations.

This is what we found: At the end of the unit, students have effectively to violate the idea of conservation when they explain phenomena. Instead, the correctly track energy as it transfers across systems.

Even better, they start to use energy generatively. For example a student started thinking about the process that must be going on in the sun ( a chemical reaction maybe?) so that it can transfer energy to the bread in a solar cooker.

In essence, we found that students started to adopt a qualitative understanding of energy conservation in the new unit. A really promising result that deserves further investigation and together with other evidence suggests that we may need to reconsider how we teach energy.