CTS Guide: Conservation of Energy, pp. 170-171- Section IV Research Summaries

Conservation of Energy

• Students often have trouble accepting the idea that energy is conserved because in our everyday lives, there is no such thing as an isolated system—objects are always interacting with their environment (Nordine 2016).

• The idea of energy conservation has been identified as one that requires a high level of being able to integrate several ideas. For example, to understand energy conservation, one must understand how energy can be transferred and transformed and that this is accompanied by a dissipation of energy to the surrounding environment (Lee and Lieu 2010).

• Several researchers report that students do not recognize that energy is conserved and the same applies to matter when a substance seems to disappear (Driver et al. 1994).

• A study found that prior to instruction, students ages 12–14 could make correct predictions about changes in energy but only about 2% could explain their prediction using the idea of energy transfer and none mentioned conservation of energy. After instruction, only 17% used ideas about energy transfer in their explanation and only 10% used conservation of energy ideas. Duit (1984) reasons that students do not see a need for energy conservation as they prefer to use ideas from their everyday experiences rather than what they were encouraged to use in their science class.