57 research outputs found
Negative Energy: Why Interdisciplinary Physics Requires Multiple Ontologies
Much recent work in physics education research has focused on ontological
metaphors for energy, particularly the substance ontology and its pedagogical
affordances. The concept of negative energy problematizes the substance
ontology for energy, but in many instructional settings, the specific
difficulties around negative energy are outweighed by the general advantages of
the substance ontology. However, we claim that our interdisciplinary setting (a
physics class that builds deep connections to biology and chemistry) leads to a
different set of considerations and conclusions. In a course designed to draw
interdisciplinary connections, the centrality of chemical bond energy in
biology necessitates foregrounding negative energy from the beginning. We argue
that the emphasis on negative energy requires a combination of substance and
location ontologies. The location ontology enables energies both "above" and
"below" zero. We present preliminary student data that illustrate difficulties
in reasoning about negative energy, and the affordances of the location
metaphor.Comment: 4 pages, submitted to PERC 2013 Proceeding
Students' Views of Macroscopic and Microscopic Energy in Physics and Biology
Energy concepts are fundamental across the sciences, yet these concepts can
be fragmented along disciplinary boundaries, rather than integrated into a
coherent whole. To teach physics effectively to biology students, we need to
understand students' disciplinary perspectives. We present interview data from
an undergraduate student who displays multiple stances towards the concept of
energy. At times he views energy in macroscopic contexts as a separate entity
from energy in microscopic (particularly biological) contexts, while at other
times he uses macroscopic physics phenomena as productive analogies for
understanding energy in the microscopic biological context, and he reasons
about energy transformations between the microscopic and macroscopic scales.
This case study displays preliminary evidence for the context dependence of
students' ability to translate energy concepts across scientific disciplines.
This points to challenges that must be taken into account in developing
curricula for biology students that integrate physics and biology concepts.Comment: 4 pages, submitted to PERC 201
Ontological metaphors for negative energy in an interdisciplinary context
Teaching about energy in interdisciplinary settings that emphasize coherence
among physics, chemistry, and biology leads to a more central role for chemical
bond energy. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to chemical energy
leads to modeling chemical bonds in terms of negative energy. While recent work
on ontological metaphors for energy has emphasized the affordances of the
substance ontology, this ontology is problematic in the context of negative
energy. Instead, we apply a dynamic ontologies perspective to argue that
blending the substance and location ontologies for energy can be effective in
reasoning about negative energy in the context of reasoning about chemical
bonds. We present data from an introductory physics for the life sciences
(IPLS) course in which both experts and students successfully use this blended
ontology. Blending these ontologies is most successful when the substance and
location ontologies are combined such that each is strategically utilized in
reasoning about particular aspects of energetic processes.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
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