EP Meeting - Heat and Light Comparisons 11/16/2011

In the midst of paper writing, I was able to escape for a brief moment to look at two videos that are simply intriguing and rich. 
E2 Conversation about Thermal Energy 
In the EP Meeting, we first looked at a video of E2, where Leslie and crew are attempting to describe where the thermal energy fits into the lowering and lifting a ball scenario.  
The video is this: E2 110816 1253 R.Leslie.Light.Thermal.Subtitles.  


Leslie says that "sometimes thermal appears without forces" and I wanted to understand where she was coming from in terms of conduction.  We talked about how conduction does have forces, but at a microscopic level.  When we look at a free body diagram, the forces associated with it are those that affect the "macroscopic motion" of the object.  Thermal energy is a macroscopic description of the energy, however it doesn't quite work with the idea of associating a force with its energy transfer.  When we implement the free body diagram, we are limiting our story to macroscopic ideas.   Within E2, the selected scenarios allowed the teachers to postpone thermal energy in general, in hope of getting to it after they had established a working relationship between the energy and forces macroscopically - but they never got to thermal energy.


Lane said that the modeling training over the summer also postponed involving thermal energy.  I found this interesting because in my classroom, I also never got to a point where I was talking about thermal energy in depth.  This seems to be the last step that is often neglected, perhaps because it is most complicated?  I think this neglect/postponement/ignoring of thermal energy is because of several factors, and all of these factors may lead to a lack of general understanding of heat, thermal processes, and entropy.
    1. Time - teachers do not have the "time" to go into depth about any subject, so thermal energy is left on the back burner. 
    2. It is a macroscopic description of a microscopic phenomena.  This makes it difficult to simplify and describe quickly and easily. 
    3. Perhaps because we have a lack of force associated with thermal energy, it becomes more difficult to understand. 
    4.  Words and their definitions associated with thermal energy are often confused with each other - for example: 

• heat, 
• light, 
• hotness, 
• infrared, 
• energy, 
• entropy, 
• warmth,  
• and thermal.

These words are often confused, even among physicists!  An agreed upon definition of some of these words has yet to emerge from physics, let alone all of science (in particular I am thinking of heat, entropy and energy). The abstract nature of these words, the fact that we cannot "see" some of these phenomena makes understanding difficult, especially in the case of heat, warmth, and entropy. 
Leslie talks about being "near a nice, hot light" and this combination of hot and light could be confusing.  Is she talking about the radiation or the conduction from the light bulb to the air?  Is she talking about the infrared or visible light that is being emitted?  


Right after this, they begin to list off other ways in which thermal energy is present: 
Leslie: So sometimes forces do seem to increase thermal, and sometimes other things increase thermal.  Thermal has a weird story it seems. 
Jim: It can come from chemical, it can come from two sliding objects.
Leslie: It can come from electrical, like a spark, yeah. 


But these are all different situations, with different thermal transfers.  It is quite complicated!  Is it appropriate to talk about all of these situations as being related/similar/the same/connected?  


Heat and Light in E1 ET of a Light Bulb
We jumped then to another video of a group from E1 who was doing ET, trying to figure out how to represent a light bulb correctly.  It features Tim and Tomme predominantly.  
The episode is saved as: E1 110817 0912 Heat&Light
Here, we talked about photons, the electromagnetic spectrum, and how this is all related to a light bulb.  We determined that Tomme is probably confusing infrared light with heat energy, a concept that I was unsure of until recently.  Tomme says, "light is a higher energy state than heat."  Later she says that thermal energy is lower energy, with a longer wavelength.   She also asks, "isn't heat our dead end?"  I have a lot more to do with this episode.  I find it fascinating, mostly because I think her ideas are correct, but her vocabulary is confused.  She knows what she is talking about, but she is not using the correct words for her descriptions. 


Some questions that came out of this discussion included: 
    1.     Is visible light able to transfer to infrared? (I believe the answer is yes, with the object absorbing the visible light, then re-emitting the energy in the form of infrared light with more photons.)
    2.     Do we think of entropy as stuff?  What sorts of analogies are out there for entropy?  
                   - We mentioned Bellatrix's Vault as a possible analogy, as well as love, happiness, the Golden Grinder, and Hydra (cutting the head off to produce many more heads...). 
    3.     Does the Hope Diamond glow when you cuddle with it?  (I believe the answer is no - but it does glow red if you shine higher energy light on it!!)  :) 


Thanks all for the great discussion!!

What is science?

I am thinking about the nature of science on at least two levels. For one thing, we are trying to learn what the teachers in our program think is scientific, because one of our goals is to have them recognize science to be what we think of it as being. For another, I am thinking about the kind of research that I do these days and trying to identify what makes it scientific (and when it falls short). 

Here are a couple things that are not necessarily defining characteristics of science for me:

1. The scientific method. Though hypothesis testing and control of variables is great stuff, it can't be the whole story. At a minimum, there has to be some prior activity by which you obtained the hypothesis.

2. Laws of nature, by which I mean F=ma, energy conservation, and other such things. At a minimum, there has to be a process by which such laws are developed, and that would mean being scientific even before you knew anything about any laws.

I think that either of these things might be sufficient for identifying something as scientific, depending on your values, but to me neither of them is necessary - there is science that has neither of these properties. Hunter introduced me to Robert Hooke's drawing of a flea:

I mean, look at that thing. Click to make the picture bigger -- it's incredible. I had no idea a flea looked like that. Though there is no hypothesis here, no claim, and no laws of nature, to produce such a drawing feels like high science to me. So, here is something I count as science: The systematic observation and documentation of the details of phenomena.

This can't mean just looking at things. The explorers who went down into the deep ocean in a bathysphere, Barton and Beebe, likely saw all kinds of astonishing things, but didn't bring back much that oceanographers felt they could use, partly because they were unable to document what they saw and partly because they didn't know all that much about fish. Their seeing was limited by their lack of professional vision (the distinctive ways in which professionals notice and interpret phenomena of their profession). So, whatever it is that makes observation scientific has to do with having a "trained eye." And the observations that are made have to answer to the standards of the discipline.

Another thing that I want to count as science is going to be something about model-building -- the construction of explanatory accounts of phenomena. I haven't thought as much about that today.

For Emily: Chemical Energy

I'm tagging things that seem relevant to Emily Moore, a postdoc at CU Boulder whose background is in chemistry, as I process data for myself. I was looking for a particular episode and came across this gem from 2011 UE1 (entitled UE1 110630 1030 heather):

Not only is this full of fantastic stuff about chemical energy, Heather (?) says at the end that she is coming to believe that there's not different types of energy but that energy is a pure substance (that undergoes transformation). The teachers seem to think this is deep...and cool. What's really cool about this to me is that this is the kind of stuff that seems to be under debate (at the meta level) in the scientific community.

Teaching Seminar Reflection on Journals

Last night was our third teaching seminar. Attendance was dismal. At 5:30 there was only one teacher. At 6:00 we had six teachers. As Abby pointed out, it’s a pretty ridiculous use of resources to have four of us (Lane, Abby, me, Amy) there for six teachers. It seems like we need to rethink the structure with the informal discussion over dinner first because it just encourages people to show up late.

Zhomes Debrief:

We started with a debrief of the tour of Zhomes, guided by the question “What did you learn that you could use in your classroom?” There was an interesting range of responses about possible student activities, ranging from asking students to follow the energy in very specific aspects of the house (e.g. the super-insulated walls or the geothermal heat pump) to asking students to design a house (or a high school) that balances many complex and competing factors (energy savings, cost, water use, esthetics, community, etc.). A lot of the discussion focused on teachers’ own ideas about weighing complex factors in design. I was impressed to hear that after the tour Jeff had gone home and looked up the statistics behind some of their claims. He found several sources that gave values for the “average” energy use of a home, which had a lot of variation, but all were much lower than the value of 22K kWh to which our tour guide had favorably compared the Zhome energy use.

Reflecting on Journals:

Then Lane led the group in sharing their reflections from their journals. The exercise Abby had given them in the first teaching seminar was to jot down in their journal things they had learned about student thinking. Tonight they were supposed to share one thing they had learned. When we planned the first teaching seminar, we knew that this exercise would be difficult for them and that they would probably misinterpret it. We knew that really hearing student ideas is difficult, that this is our goal for what we hope they will be able to do at the end of teaching seminar, and that we don’t really expect them to get it the first time. So why were we so surprised and unprepared when it went exactly as we expected?

Perhaps because it started off so fantastic that we weren’t expecting the sudden dive off the cliff…

Lisa went first with a discussion of an activity in which she asked students to try to define forces. She noticed that they were initially defining forces as energy. I will need to go back to the video to remember exactly what she said, but I was really impressed with her respectful curiosity about her students’ thinking. She never said or implied that anything about this student idea as wrong or bad, but got really curious about where it was coming from and how they could use it productively when they got around to discussing energy. I was particularly impressed to hear this from Lisa given her previous history. She took E1 in 2009, E2 in 2010, and has been to nearly every teaching seminar we’ve ever had. During the first year of teaching seminar, she was part of a group of Bellevue teachers that I loathed listening to, because all they ever did was bitch about how dumb their students were and all the things they didn’t get. I don’t know how much Lisa herself participated in those discussions, because I tried to avoid listening to them and she didn’t stand out to me. But if she had been engaging with student ideas in 2009 the way she was last night, I think she would have stood out to me. So I suspect that what I observed last night was some pretty amazing progress.

Then Lane shared a student idea of how a cfl bulb works, which launched the teachers into all sorts of tangents about light bulbs, electricity, and energy conservation, but not about student ideas. This went on for way too long before we cut it off.

Then Laura shared about giving her students a pretest and posttest on electric circuits and being shocked by how poorly they did on the posttest, even though she had just given them a totally clear lesson and it seemed like they were getting it. (She also brought in copies of her students’ pretests and posttests for Keeley probes). Her discussion was totally focused on how they didn’t get it, and not really on what the students were actually thinking, but I felt like this was a fantastic starting point. Recognizing that your students aren’t learning what you think they’re learning is a critical first step to really hearing what they are thinking. This feels to me like something we can work with. (Never mind that we didn’t.) Laura took UE1 in 2009, and hasn’t been back to any Energy Project classes until Teaching Seminar this year, so it seemed like a nice confirmation that maybe we’re having some effect that she wasn’t as far along in her thinking as Lisa.

Then Jeff talked about a lesson on energy transfers and transformations, and he talked for quite a while, but I didn’t hear anything at all about student thinking, even wrong student thinking, just stuff about his lesson. I asked him what specific student ideas he learned, and he continued to talk about his lesson. Neither Abby nor Lane remember me asking him about student ideas, so maybe I wasn’t clear. I definitely wasn’t forceful enough, because I didn’t ask a second time or point out that he still wasn’t talking about student ideas.

Then Ingrid talked about an activity she did where her students looked at energy used in different sports. Like Jeff, she focused on the lesson and not on student ideas. I also asked her to tell us a specific student idea. She said one group had a hypothesis about the energy of running on Astroturf vs. cement, but then did an experiment to test it and discovered that their hypothesis was wrong. I think there was something like a student idea in here, the thing the students initially thought, but her focus was on how they tested it, not on what the students were thinking. I think we could have worked with this productively to tease out the student idea, but we didn’t.

Then Jean told a really inspiring story about a student she was working with who had been really difficult and rebellious and was suddenly turning around and getting really excited about science. This story wasn’t really about student ideas either, but it was so inspiring that nobody really had the heart to interrupt her.

Then Kim told a story about a lesson about burning almonds, which I think she hasn’t even actually given to her students yet because she’s still trying to figure out the chemistry of it herself. There was nothing about student ideas, but I didn’t have the heart to ask because everyone seemed anxious to move on.

By the time everyone was done sharing we only had a half hour left for a lot of other stuff we had planned. The instructors had a little pow-wow while the teachers were reading the big ideas article for the next section, and we decided Lane would give a little speech at the end explaining again what it means to write down a student idea.

Big Ideas:

The last section was looking at the Thompson article about big ideas and trying to figure out how to form groups to look at big ideas over the rest of the year. There was a lot of confusion about how to form groups. It’s going to be a difficult task because there is so much diversity about levels, topics, and how frequently people show up. Lane is going to set up google doc to help people figure it out.

Wrap-up:

We ended with Lane’s little speech in which he emphasized that what we want teachers to do is to “Focus on a single student idea that surprised you.” Kim asked, “Regardless of whether it’s right or wrong?” and we said yes, whether it’s right or wrong is not the point at all. This seemed like a good question, that indicated that she might be understanding the assignment. Lisa asked, “Is it OK if it's not surprising?” pointing out that she’s been teaching for a long time so she’s not surprised by much anymore. We said that’s OK.

"Press release"

As we come into the last year-ish of the Energy Project, we are trying to get a sense of our accomplishments, especially since what we have done in the past few years is not at all what was planned. Our hired evaluators are pushing us on this partly because their job is to evaluate us relative to our own goals for ourselves. They routinely ask their clients to do what they call a "history of the future" exercise, for which the task is:  Imagine the project is over. Write a press release describing what it accomplished. 

To help us with this reflection we solicited thoughts from some savvy collaborators who we thought would give us helpful perspective on our project, and had a big ol' brainstorming meeting in which we filled the board with things that we either (1) feel we have accomplished (even if not necessarily documented) or (2) expect ourselves to have accomplished by the end of the project. That night I was inspired to write the press release. I had a little fun with it. Suggestions welcome.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Multimillion Dollar Project Championed the Teaching and Learning of Energy in Physics

The Energy Project, the five-year, $3.7-million project that put physics education research and professional development at SPU on the map, has concluded. Among the prime contributions of the Energy Project was to improve the energy content knowledge of everyone involved – from teachers to faculty researchers. Some of this development leveraged the energy-as-a-substance metaphor into powerful new representations of energy, including Energy Theater, Energy Blocks, and Energy Diagrams. Armed with these organizing representational tools, learners tackled more complex energy scenarios than are normally attempted in physics courses. No roller-coasters for this crowd: instead learners took on refrigerators, cold packs, the Gaussian Gun, and electric circuits, among others. These rich tasks have given the Project unprecedented opportunity to identify K-12 teachers’ ideas about energy, including valid alternative ontologies for energy (e.g., as a fuel or a stimulus). Teacher interests drove researchers to take seriously topics not normally addressed in introductory physics, including the idea that what matters about energy is not only its conservation (as physicists normally emphasize) but also its usefulness, and how the quality of energy may deteriorate as a result of certain processes. This line of research led to a model for teaching about entropy, a concept that has been misused to bolster nonscientific arguments about evolution. Teacher interests also pushed faculty researchers into new intellectual territory in articulating the meaning and value of forms of energy, and in disambiguating energy concepts from force concepts ­­– then subsequently weaving together these two causal factors in an integrated mechanistic account of physical processes. This energy content development not only served K-12 teaching interests, but also advanced the field of physics.

The Project’s groundbreaking research about the teaching and learning of energy took place primarily in the context of innovative professional development courses. Unlike courses that simplistically tell teachers what to do, these courses were taught responsively; instructors attended to the disciplinary substance of teachers’ thinking, took intellectual concerns seriously, and used the observations they made to guide the course content. “The participants (and their interests) are driving the questions that the class explores, within limits,” said visiting faculty researcher MacKenzie Stetzer. “They are really taking ownership of the experience in a way that leads to a more explicit partnership between the instructor and the participants.” Collaborator Siri Mehus, faculty researcher specializing in interaction analysis, said, “In its design, the course seemed to find an ideal balance between openness (participants chart their own course of exploring and understanding energy concepts) and structure (exercises and activities are well-organized, logically sequenced, and clear in their purpose). As the parent of a school-age child, it makes me very happy to know that the people who are teaching our children (at least a few of them) are thinking about students’ learning in the way that this course promotes.” Goals of the summer institute included not only energy content but also the development of teacher agency in science, enhancement of teacher understanding of the nature of science as a flexible and constructed body of knowledge, and teacher recognition that they themselves could contribute to that body of knowledge. Goals of the academic-year professional development program included fostering teacher attention to the disciplinary substance of student thinking in a “video club” model, in which teachers collaboratively analyzed video of one another’s classrooms. In a capstone effort, the Project in its last year developed the means to support teachers in putting their professional development experiences to use in their own classrooms, the ultimate goal of any professional development effort.

In addition to the pragmatic effort to improve the teaching and learning of energy, the Project made extraordinary contributions to the development of cognitive theory, well beyond what had been originally envisioned. In making use of the energy-as-a-substance metaphor the Project aligned itself with cognitive linguistics, in which metaphor is a primary organizer of thinking and a significant factor in conceptual change. In using the body as a symbolic system for learning abstract concepts (in Energy Theater), the Project found itself contributing to the most current theories of embodied cognition. These contributions took the Project beyond the teaching and learning of energy specifically into the territory of how thinking and learning take place in general, and extended the reach of the resulting research into the learning sciences.

Had these efforts been merely local, they would still have been tremendously admirable. Fortunately, during the Energy Project years, the team at SPU launched itself into the national community of physics education researchers, sharing findings and recruiting collaborators at an unprecedented scale. Dozens of talks and multiple papers, both short and long, contributed to the PER community’s recognition of the extraordinary potential of energy as a research topic. The Energy Project Summer Research Institute (EPSRI), founded to help the Energy Project create and manage its hundreds of hours of video documentation, provided a diverse community of researchers with an arena for inter-theoretical research on a common data set and made SPU a hub for scholarly community, mentorship, and leadership development. “The EPSRI is a huge community-building exercise that provides the whole PER community with deeper connections and new skills. It aligns a community around common tools and questions,” offered Michael Wittmann, lead faculty in the Maine Physical Sciences Project. By the end of the Project, SPU team members had established a new Physics Education Research Group at SPU, grounded in the Department of Physics and the School of Education. With two new full-time research faculty, three new graduate students, and multiple faculty collaborators in addition to the permanent faculty at SPU, the team is eagerly anticipating its next multi-million-dollar research program.