Assessing Students’ Understanding of the Energy Concept Across Science Disciplines

• In Event: Exploring Scientific Thinking

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to develop an instrument for assessing understanding of energy across science disciplines, to validate the instrument, and to examine the students’ understanding of the energy concept across science disciplines. Forty-nine items were developed, presented in pairs: multiple choice and open-ended justification. Partial credit Rasch model was used to analyze data. Results show that the instrument can produce reliable and valid measures. The study found that there was no universal order of difficulties among the energy aspects of source/form, transfer, degradation, conservation, indicating that item difficulties of energy aspects depend on disciplinary contexts. This study contributes to new knowledge on contextualized nature of energy understanding and informs future research on learning progressions in energy.

Authors

• Mihwa Park, University at Buffalo - SUNY

• Xiufeng Liu, University at Buffalo - SUNY