Michael Wittmann

In the Maine Physical Sciences Partnership (MainePSP), we have observed that students improve the way they analyze thermal energy after instruction. Still, many of them continue to use the idea that " coldness " transfers. Past researchers have identified that " cold " is commonly perceived as a separate heat energy. Nevertheless, we have not found specific activities to address this idea. We present analysis of students' conceptual understanding of energy transfer and how the use of coldness as an entity plays a role in it. We explore how both ideas interact with each other using two different multiple choice items. To illustrate the difficulty of addressing student difficulties with coldness, we analyze a collaborative session among K-12 teachers who modeled energy transfers in scenarios similar to the student items and had to work to reconcile the conflict between the two models. Our study shows how the concept of coldness as an energy entity can co-exist and be in conflict with the idea of thermal energy, even after instruction.

We examine the types of emergent language eighth grade students in rural Maine middle schools use when they discuss energy in their first experiences with Project-Based Inquiry Science: Energy, a research-based curriculum that uses a specific language for talking about energy. By comparative analysis of the language used by the curriculum materials to students' language, we find that students' talk is at times more aligned with a Stores and Transfer model of energy than the Forms model supported by the curriculum.

Abstract We show that students rearranging the terms of a mathematical equation in order to separate variables prior to integration use gestures and speech to manipulate the mathematical terms on the page. They treat the terms of the equation as physical objects in a landscape, capable of being moved around. We analyze our results within the tradition of embodied cognition and use conceptual metaphors such as the path-source-goal schema and the idea of fictive motion. We find that students solving the problem correctly and ...

ABSTRACT The Activity-Based Tutorials are designed to accompany and enhance lecture instruction. They have been developed using a cycle of physics education research, including investigations into student learning on a given topic, development of materials, and revision of the materials based on evaluation after use in the classroom. Activity-Based Tutorials, Volume 1: Introductory Physicspresents tutorials for topics in kinematics dynamics, oscillations, waves, heat and temperature, electrostatics, and circuits.

Teachers discussing pedagogical strategies to help students with an incorrect idea about potential energy expressed competing goals for guiding student thinking: keep it simple and explore complexity. On the one hand, teachers wished to avoid being "overly complicated" in their teaching, suggesting that they should have students stick to naming forms of energy in a system and naming principles like the law of conservation of energy. On the other hand, teachers recognized that students might also engage with, wonder about, and have good ideas about systems, mechanisms, and causality. In addition, teachers themselves showed a need develop operational understandings of energy transformation, conservation, and system even in a simple energy scenario, rather than simply identifying forms and principles. Thus, the initial desire for keeping instruction simple was contradicted both by the recognition that students were capable of more complex analysis, even if it interfered with the goals of simple instruction, and by an awareness that understanding even a simple energy scenario involves grappling with complex ideas.

We studied a group of middle school teachers as they modified curriculum and developed common formative assessments on force and motion concepts. While designing an item and discussing goals for student understanding of acceleration, two of the teachers held opposing models (one of them being incomplete) about the implications of the sign of acceleration on the direction of an object's motion and whether it was speeding up or slowing down. Failing to resolve the inconsistency between their individual models, the teachers wrote an assessment item for which both models would provide the same correct response, albeit for different reasons. The potential to elicit correct answers for incorrect reasons created ambiguity in the ability to recognize probable alternative conceptions. More specifically, the item had limited ability both to refine the teachers' own conceptual understanding and to accurately inform their instruction, interventions, and feedback that would support students in identifying their mistakes.

A variety of tools have been created to understand student performance on multiple-choice tests, including analysis of normalized gain, item response curves, and more. These methods typically focus on correct answers. Many incorrect responses contain value and can be used as building blocks for instruction, but present tools do not account for productive reasoning leading to an incorrect response. Inspired by Item Response Curves, we introduce Idea Use Curves, which relate frequency with which an idea is used to student performance. We use this tool to consider ideas which may be present in both correct responses and distractors, letting us attend more to students' conceptual understanding. This tool is made with the goal of identifying ideas that are consistently used by students who perform well or poorly, allowing researchers and instructors to look beyond the " correct/incorrect " paradigm. We explore student reasoning about energy as a proof of concept for this method.