Below are some of the ongoing research interests of the Energy Project. We encourage you to pursue whatever research interests grab you, whether those originate with you or with us. You do not need to pursue any of these during your I-RISE session. However, to prepare for your I-RISE experience, please choose at least one of the following topics, read at least one of the related articles (or another article on that topic that you want to bring to our attention), and post a 500-word reflection on it to this blog.
We are also still interested in the things we were interested in in 2011 and 2012.
Energy degradation and dissipation
Energy conservation is central both in a sociopolitical sense and in the formal study of physics, but the term has a different meaning in each context. In physics, energy conservation refers to the idea that the same total quantity of energy is always present in any closed system; energy is neither created nor destroyed. In the pubic consciousness, however, energy conservation refers to the idea that we have to guard against energy being wasted or used up; the energy available to serve human purposes is both created (in power plants) and destroyed (in processes that render it unavailable to us). We are creating a conceptual model for what happens to energy during physical processes, expecting to eventually include entropy and the second law of thermodynamics.
Content knowledge for teaching energy / Responsive teaching
“Content knowledge for teaching” is the specialized content knowledge that teachers use in practice – the content knowledge that serves them for tasks of teaching such as making sense of students’ ideas, anticipating conceptual challenges students will face, selecting instructional tasks, and assessing student work. "Responsive teaching" is when teachers respond to the disciplinary substance of student ideas as they arise during classroom instruction. We hope to better understand teacher’s practices along these related lines, and also to develop criteria for observational assessment of both of these constructs.
Relational discourse
Normal classroom conditions, characterized by evaluation and attention to learning targets, may present threats to students’ sense of their own competence and value, causing them to conceal their ideas and reducing the potential for proximal formative assessment. In contrast, discourse patterns characterized by positive anticipation and attention to learner ideas increase the potential for proximal formative assessment and promote self-directed learning. Excerpts and reflections on this blog: General approach. Carl Rogers on education parts I, II, and III. Example of relational discourse among learners. Application of theory to classroom observation.
Forms of energy Our primary learning goal is for learners to conserve energy as they track its transfers and transformations among objects. Another learning goal is to coordinate our theoretical model of energy with observable properties of objects. One way we do this is by categorizing energy into forms that correspond to types of observable evidence of energy.
Energy conservation is central both in a sociopolitical sense and in the formal study of physics, but the term has a different meaning in each context. In physics, energy conservation refers to the idea that the same total quantity of energy is always present in any closed system; energy is neither created nor destroyed. In the pubic consciousness, however, energy conservation refers to the idea that we have to guard against energy being wasted or used up; the energy available to serve human purposes is both created (in power plants) and destroyed (in processes that render it unavailable to us). We are creating a conceptual model for what happens to energy during physical processes, expecting to eventually include entropy and the second law of thermodynamics.
- T. G. Amin, F. Jeppsson, J. Haglund, and H. Strömdahl, "Arrow of Time: Metaphorical Construals of Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics," Science Education 96 (5), 818-848 (2012).
- A. R. Daane, S. Vokos, and R. E. Scherr, "Learner understanding of energy degradation," submitted to 2013 Physics Education Research Conference
- A. R. Daane, S. Vokos, and R. E. Scherr, "Conserving energy in physics and society: Creating an integrated model of energy and the second law of thermodynamics," in 2012 Physics Education Research Conference, edited by P. Engelhardt, A. D. Churukian, and N. S. Rebello (AIP Conference Proceedings, Philadelphia, PA, 2013), Vol. 1513, pp. 114-117. [Fair warning: we have changed our mind about one of the principles in this paper.]
- K. A. Ross, "Matter scatter and energy anarchy: The second law of thermodynamics is simply common experience," School Science Review69 (248), 438-445 (1988).
Content knowledge for teaching energy / Responsive teaching
“Content knowledge for teaching” is the specialized content knowledge that teachers use in practice – the content knowledge that serves them for tasks of teaching such as making sense of students’ ideas, anticipating conceptual challenges students will face, selecting instructional tasks, and assessing student work. "Responsive teaching" is when teachers respond to the disciplinary substance of student ideas as they arise during classroom instruction. We hope to better understand teacher’s practices along these related lines, and also to develop criteria for observational assessment of both of these constructs.
- J. E. Coffey, D. Hammer, D. M. Levin, and T. Grant, "The missing disciplinary substance of formative assessment," Journal of Research in Science Teaching 48 (10), 1109-1136 (2011).
- D. L. Ball, M. H. Thames, and G. Phelps, "Content knowledge for teaching: What makes it special?," Journal of Teacher Education 59, 389-407 (2008).
- E. van Es, "A framework for learning to notice student thinking," in Mathematics teacher noticing: Seeing through teachers' eyes, edited by M. G. Sherin, V. R. Jacobs, and R. A. Philipp (Routledge, New York, 2011), pp. 134-151.
- D. L. Ball, "With an eye on the mathematical horizon: Dilemmas of teaching elementary school mathematics," The Elementary School Journal 93 (4), 373-397 (1993).
- F. Erickson, "Some thoughts on “proximal” formative assessment of student learning," in Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 106 (2007), Vol. 106, pp. 186-216.
- D. Hammer and E. van Zee, Seeing the science in children's thinking: Case studies of student inquiry in physical science.(Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH, 2006).
Relational discourse
Normal classroom conditions, characterized by evaluation and attention to learning targets, may present threats to students’ sense of their own competence and value, causing them to conceal their ideas and reducing the potential for proximal formative assessment. In contrast, discourse patterns characterized by positive anticipation and attention to learner ideas increase the potential for proximal formative assessment and promote self-directed learning. Excerpts and reflections on this blog: General approach. Carl Rogers on education parts I, II, and III. Example of relational discourse among learners. Application of theory to classroom observation.
- Rogers, C. (1961). Significant learning: In therapy and in education. On becoming a person: A therapist's view of psychotherapy (pp. 279-296). New York: Houghton Mifflin.
- R. E. Scherr, H. G. Close, and S. B. McKagan, "Promoting Proximal Formative Assessment with Relational Discourse," C. Singh, M. Sabella, and Engelhardt (Eds.), AIP Conf. Proc. 1413, pp. 347-350 (2011 Physics Education Research Conference)
Forms of energy Our primary learning goal is for learners to conserve energy as they track its transfers and transformations among objects. Another learning goal is to coordinate our theoretical model of energy with observable properties of objects. One way we do this is by categorizing energy into forms that correspond to types of observable evidence of energy.
- S. B. McKagan, R. E. Scherr, E. W. Close, and H. G. Close, "Criteria for creating and categorizing forms of energy," in 2011 Physics Education Research Conference, edited by C. Singh, M. Sabella, and P. Engelhardt (AIP Conference Proceedings, 2011), Vol. 1413, pp. 279-282.
- W. H. Kaper and M. J. Goedhart, "'Forms of energy,' an intermediary language on the road to thermodynamics? Part I," International Journal of Science Education 24 (1), 81-95 (2002).
- J. W. Jewett, "Energy and the confused student IV: A global approach to energy," The Physics Teacher 46 (4), 210-217 (2008).
Comments on “Conserving energy in physics and society: Creating an integrated model of energy and the second law of thermodynamics” by Daane, Vokos and Sherr (2012)
ReplyDeleteOverall, I am attracted to the idea of introducing the second law of thermodynamics early in science teaching. As pointed out in the paper, it may be used to provide a link between the everyday notion of energy being wasted and scientific accounts of thermodynamics, and thereby help understanding the climate issues we face. I had not seen the Ross (1988) paper before I found it on the reading list for I-RISE, and it provides intriguing ideas of how the second law may be grounded in folk understanding and everyday language. In the same vein, Duit (1984) asks rhetorically: “Is the second law of thermodynamics easier to understand than the first law?”. Newman et al. (2010) even trace an intiutive understanding of entropy to infants.
I like the approach of talking about the varying ‘quality’ or ‘usefulness’ of energy as a way to reconcile the idea that energy may be wasted, yet conserved. The notion of different ‘energy qualities’ of different forms of energy, in terms of the percentage of the energy that may be used to perform work or be made to use in a way we want, has been used in Swedish national curricula for the last two decades. The notion of ‘exergy’ also comes to mind in this context.
In the example of a hand compressing a spring, it says “Some of the thermal energy in the hand is transferred to the environment via conduction.” Maybe the other mechanisms of heat, i.e. convection and radiation, provide larger contributions?
The Energy Tracking Diagrams seem like a useful way of representing transfer and transformation of energy in order to incorporate the tendency of energy to degrade and spread. Have you tried to represent energy spreading and degradation in the Energy Theater context? I would imagine that as humans, we would rather tend to stick together, which might be mapped to some kind of binding energy, but that would make the situation messier and probably difficult to understand.
There is a heading “As Energy Spreads, Thermal Energy Never Decreases”. I wonder if this is technically correct. What about endothermic processes, such as mixing ice and table salt, which results in a liquid solution below 0 °C. Thermal energy is used for breaking the bindings in the solid ice, which is traded off against the increased entropy of mixing. Is this perchance the issue which you have reconsidered, as you hint to in the blog instructions?
It is wise to recognize the work of Leff (2012) on energy spreading. We have acknowledged that Leff’s metaphor “entropy is spreading” is useful, but that it might be complemented by others, such as comparing entropy to ‘information’ and ‘freedom’ (Jeppsson, Haglund, & Strömdahl, 2011).
Although not the main theme in this particular paper, it will be interesting to discuss the pros and cons of conceptualizing different physical quantities as “substance-like”, including ‘energy’, ‘entropy’ and ‘momentum’ (e.g. Herrmann, 2000).
References
Duit, R. (1984). Is the second law of thermodynamics easier to understand than the first law? Tijdschrift Didactiek Natuurwetenschappen, 2(2), 102-111.
Herrmann, F. (2000). The Karlsruhe Physics Course. European Journal of Physics, 21(1), 49-58.
Jeppsson, F., Haglund, J., & Strömdahl, H. (2011). Exploiting language in teaching of entropy. Journal of Baltic Science Education, 10(1), 27-35.
Leff, H. S. (2012). Removing the mystery of entropy and thermodynamics - Part II. The Physics Teacher, 50(2), 87-90.
Newman, G. E., Keil, F. C., Kuhlmeier, V. A., & Wynn, K. (2010). Early understandings of the link between agents and order. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 107(40), 17140-17145.
Ross, K. A. (1988). Matter scatter and energy anarchy: The second law of thermodynamics is simply common sense. School Science Review, 69(248), 438-445.
Comments on “Negotiating energy dynamics through embidied action in a materially structured environment” by Scherr, et al.
DeleteCongratulations on the recent acceptance of the article! Overall, in combination with the recommended ‘technical’ reading on the blog, the article provided a good description of what I-RISE is about, with regards to the theoretical framework, approaches to data collection and collaborative analysis.
I intend to focus theoretically on the philosophical underpinnings of embodied cognition in my planned post doc studies. In addition to the background you provide, I have found the following valuable: Merleau-Ponty (2002) argues against body/mind dichotomies, reminiscing of the notion of ‘interactionist’ approaches to embodied cognition. Intriguingly from an educational point of view, in his recent book, Johnson (2007) relates his ideas of an aesthetics of cognition – in the sense that it is not all logic – to the pragmatic work of Dewey. I also found Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) stimulating.
“We take as a premise that learners’ ideas always have some seed of correctness…” I generally side with the constructivist view of learning as building on what is already known in a continuous fashion, as put forward within the resource perspective (e.g. Hammer & Elby, 2003). I still cannot ignore that there is particular science content that is inherently challenging for our students to grasp. Examples include the wave/particle duality of quantum physics, or the class of ‘emergent processes’, as described by Chi (2005). For instance, do the students that are involved in the Energy Theater differentiate between the drift velocity, i.e. the average velocity of the involved electrons, and the velocity of the individual electrons in the electric circuit?
“In many scenarios it is possible to think of matter and energy as moving together from one place to another, for example when convection currents carry air and thermal energy upward…” Albert (1978) argues that disambiguation of heat from the warm objects in which it resides is an important aspect of conceptualizing heat as a kind of substance (roughly paralleling a caloric understanding) among primary school children. This is particularly important in coming to grasp heat conduction through solid materials. As you mention, differentiation of matter and energy is important, and the metaphorical character of the substance view of energy has to be emphasized.
“The materially structured environment of Energy Theater enforces the constraints of the energy model, ‘remembering’ certain facts about energy and shaping the group’s insights as they work together”. Apart from Hutchins’ work on distributed cognition, who you refer to, this line of reasoning reminds of Zhang and Norman’s (1994) study on the physical constraints of ‘the Tower of Hanoi’, even though they do not focus on the social interaction.
“Lane has been listening without speaking for several minutes.” I get the impression that you often leave to the groups to settle issues them bump into themselves. How do we as teachers/instructors make sure that our students do not develop “idiosyncratic explanations”?
Albert, E. (1978). Development of the concept of heat in children. Science Education, 62(3), 389-399.
Chi, M. T. H. (2005). Commonsense conceptions of emergent processes: Why some misconceptions are robust. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14(2), 161-199.
Hammer, D., & Elby, A. (2003). Tapping epistemological resources for learning physics. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 12(1), 53-90.
Johnson, M. (2007). The meaning of the body: aesthetics of human understanding. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). London, UK: Routledge.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zhang, J., & Norman, D. A. (1994). Representations in distributed cognitive tasks. Cognitive Science, 18(1), 87-122.
Jesper,
DeleteYou are correct in your thinking about the thermal energy never decreases. My thinking has changed (grown) since last summer and I disagree with myself! :)
I am also intrigued about the ontologies of energy and entropy as substances and Ben Geller (a 2012 I-RISE scholar from University of Maryland)and I have been thinking about the ontology of Free energy as well. I am excited to have the opportunity to discuss this (along with energy spreading) with you this summer. I found your paper extremely interesting and complementary to what I have been thinking about for energy degradation.
Additionally, we have been brainstorming for some time about how to represent energy spreading and degradation in Energy Theater. One teacher suggested that the people might "shrink" as they become less useful. We recognize that the spreading is about location - and it is difficult to show this with Energy Theater because our location representation being the rope on the floor. The ropes are usually all the same size, even when one represents a hand and one the environment. It doesn't lend itself to spreading. I can't wait to hear more about your ideas!
Forms of Energy is the topic that I spent time researching for this assignment. The ambiguity in classifying energy types and the static and dynamic examples throughout science contents continue to create a lack of cohesiveness in terms of energy as a topic in all science disciplines. The energy concept is problematic. Teachers do not see energy as the thread that weaves all science together. Trite lists that categorize forms of energy as renewable and non-renewable can be inconsistent and are taught as recall items (memorize the types of energy and give one example). The recall items are often static and students do not enter into the idea that the different forms of energy have ambiguity.
ReplyDeleteI have spent the last five years working with teachers and students in Advanced Placement science courses across the state. The grant has served 75 diverse high schools across the state. We work with math and science to support open access to AP math and science courses. We support teachers in the form of seven days of training annually for the life of the grant and students receive an additional 18 hours of contact time in math and science courses. The bulk of the lessons that I see occurring in the classroom tend to keep forms of energy in a narrow perspective for their course and connections are not made from previous science courses.
I have had the opportunity to see how students understand and forms of energy continues to be a poorly understand topic across the science courses. In addition, the students do not easily recognize the connections that energy provides as a theme in science. To me, this is shocking, but working with the teachers and students over the last five years has shown me that somewhere in our science programs we lack connections between courses. In biology, the concept of energy is not linked throughout the course, so students learn chemical energy and photons and then get to chemistry or physics has another perspective on energy that includes waves and waves or particles and students do not always make connections to gain deeper understanding.
It was interesting to look at the previous blogs and see examples of what previous teams observed or noted. I find that I have a lot of questions about this process, but many of the examples and pictures show the teachers’ have a deeper understanding of energy and that is promising.