Forms Paper - in progress

I've been thinking for a few months about writing a paper about forms of energy expanding on some of my earlier blog posts:

http://scherrenergyproject.blogspot.com/2010/06/swackhamer-and-form.html
http://scherrenergyproject.blogspot.com/2010/07/maybe-swackhamer-was-right-after-all.html

Here's the abstract we submitted for an AAPT poster that I thought I could turn into a paper:

Understanding forms of energy through testing novel cases
National and state standards often list forms of energy that students should know, including gravitational, kinetic, potential, etc. Form can be a useful shorthand for describing the state of the system, or it can be a meaningless label to be memorized. Most physics instruction does not emphasize a deep understanding of the physical meaning of form. Are there ways that our instruction could more effectively help students gain an understanding of form? One way to develop and test understanding of forms of energy is to ask the question, “What must be considered when deciding whether a new form is legitimate?” We present case studies of students struggling with the legitimacy of forms of energy not listed in the standards, some of which they deem to be legitimate and some of which they do not. Finally, we suggest instructional methods to take advantage of this struggle.

Warren Christensen (who was a scholar-in-residence with us last fall) has been analyzing data where teachers invent the term "phase energy" to describe the energy that goes into changing phase. We've got some examples somewhere of teachers trying out various other kinds of energy, such as "cold energy", "buoyant energy", and "box energy". So the plan was that we would discuss several examples, and Warren would write up the phase energy example as a PERC paper that would be part of a larger paper on form in general.

But as we started working on it this week, the whole idea started falling apart. Hunter and Rachel questioned whether people really use form as a meaningless label, and I realized that I don't actually have a lot of evidence for them doing so. Swackhamer claims they do, but I don't really need to write a paper just to argue with an unpublished manuscript. My original evidence was the video of the guy struggling with the term "electromagnetic energy" in the video in the second blog post above, but when I went back and watched it again, I had a different interpretation: he's got a whole lot of ideas about what electromagnetic energy might be, but they don't quite fit together for him in a coherent way, and he's trying to make sense of them. He's trying to assign more meaning to the label. A lot of teachers in that clip were very concerned that that forms of energy might be used as meaningless labels, but in fact they were demonstrating a strong commitment to using these labels in a meaningful way.

Here's a new version of the abstract:

National and state standards often list forms of energy that students should know, including gravitational, kinetic, potential, etc. Form is a useful shorthand label for describing the state of a system. This type of label is useful to enable efficient communication, but it can obscure meaning. When a student uses a label for a form of energy, we do not know what meaning is packed inside that label. By watching students grapple with novel forms of energy that are not included on standard lists of forms, we can better understand how they think about form in general. We present video analysis of teachers studying energy in a summer professional development program. As these teachers come to understand a new form of energy, they invent language to describe what they are learning.

I'm still not quite satisfied because I can't articulate what it is that we better understand how they think about forms in general and why we care, but it's getting there.