Learners’ Understanding of the term energy and its related concepts

Abstract

The aim of this work is to find out how students construct these three related concepts: Energy, work and force, and understand the concepts: potential energy of electrons, heat and temperature, and energy flow. Indeed, this work conducted by administering a questionnaire to 64 students, at the faculty of science and techniques of Fez, Morocco. To identify Students’ misconception, we analyzed the obtained results by Subject Package for Social Science (SPSS). On one hand, the findings revealed that students focus on the concept of force more than on the concept of energy or work and do not make any links between them, which indicates that these concepts are poorly constructed in the student’s mind. On the other hand, we notice that Students have difficulties to understand the change of the potential energy of electrons from one energy level to another. Besides, instead of responding from an energy point of view, students use the force concept to describe a situation about energy. In addition, we have notice that many students confuse the two concepts heat and temperature. These misconceptions about energy and its related concepts are an obstacle to understanding the electron fluxes and therefore energy fluxes which are the basis of energy transduction in living cells.