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A Philosophically Informed Teaching Proposal on the Topic of Energy for Students Aged 11–14

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Abstract

Learning about energy is recognized as an important objective of science teaching starting from the elementary school. This creates the need for teaching simplifications that compromise the abstract nature of this concept with students’ need for a satisfactory qualitative definition. Conventional teaching approaches have failed to respond to this need in a productive manner. In an attempt to maintain consistency with how energy is understood in physics, they tend to either provide abstract definitions or bypass the question what is energy?, which is vitally important to students. In this paper, we describe the epistemological barriers that are inherent in conventional attempts to introduce energy as a physical quantity and we suggest that shifting the discussion to a philosophically-oriented context could provide a means to address them in a productive manner. We propose a teaching approach, for students in the age range 11–14, that introduces energy as an entity in a theoretical framework that is invented and gradually elaborated in an attempt to analyze the behavior of diverse physical systems, and especially the various changes they undergo, using a coherent perspective. This theoretical framework provides an epistemologically appropriate context that lends meaning to energy and its various features (i.e. transfer, form conversion, conservation and degradation). We argue that this philosophically informed teaching transformation provides a possible means to overcome the various shortcomings that typically characterize attempts to introduce and elaborate the construct of energy while at the same time it allows integrating, in a meaningful and coherent manner, learning objectives relevant to the understanding of the Nature of Science (NOS), which is recognized as a valuable component of learning in science. In this paper, we outline the rationale underlying this teaching approach and describe a proposed activity sequence that illustrates our proposal.

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Notes

  1. See for example Klemke et al. (1998) and Psillos and Curd (2008).

  2. Even though this issue is also relevant to other topics within the science curriculum, it seems to be particularly influential in the case of energy since its abstract and purely quantitative nature precludes a simple and satisfactory response to the question “what is energy?”. In the case of force, for example, it is possible to address this issue by helping students familiarize themselves with the idea of interaction and then guiding them to construe force as a form of interaction between at least two objects.

  3. Some examples of textbooks adopting this approach include: Bradley (2002), Challoner (2000), Australian Academy of Science (1993).

  4. In the teaching intervention, we limit ourselves to treating the utility of unification frameworks to the case of energy as an illustration. We do not generalize to other examples because we believe this generalization to be premature for this age level and also outside the scope of our intervention.

  5. The idea to represent forms of energy with drawings has been informed by the work of Boohan and Ogborn (1996) and Williams and Reeves (2003).

  6. The idea to depict forms of stored energy and energy transfer processes through cards that vary in terms of their shape (rectangles or arrows) and bear relevant drawings was largely informed by Williams and Reeves (2003).

  7. The idea to draw on the distinction between wanted and unwanted changes, as a means to address the property of energy to degrade in quality, has been adopted from Kruger et al. (1998).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Learning in Science Group, Department of Educational Sciences, University of Cyprus, P.O. Box 20537, 1678, Nicosia, Cyprus

    Nicos Papadouris & Constantinos P. Constantinou

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  1. Nicos Papadouris
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  2. Constantinos P. Constantinou
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Correspondence to Constantinos P. Constantinou.

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The study reported in this paper was carried out as part of projects EKTEMA and EPIKOITE, which were funded by the Cyprus Research Foundation through the programs PENEK20/02 and ENISX/0504/15, respectively.

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Papadouris, N., Constantinou, C.P. A Philosophically Informed Teaching Proposal on the Topic of Energy for Students Aged 11–14. Sci & Educ 20, 961–979 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-010-9305-4

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