107 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
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
NEXUS/Physics: An interdisciplinary repurposing of physics for biologists
In response to increasing calls for the reform of the undergraduate science
curriculum for life science majors and pre-medical students (Bio2010,
Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians, Vision & Change), an
interdisciplinary team has created NEXUS/Physics: a repurposing of an
introductory physics curriculum for the life sciences. The curriculum interacts
strongly and supportively with introductory biology and chemistry courses taken
by life sciences students, with the goal of helping students build general,
multi-discipline scientific competencies. In order to do this, our two-semester
NEXUS/Physics course sequence is positioned as a second year course so students
will have had some exposure to basic concepts in biology and chemistry.
NEXUS/Physics stresses interdisciplinary examples and the content differs
markedly from traditional introductory physics to facilitate this. It extends
the discussion of energy to include interatomic potentials and chemical
reactions, the discussion of thermodynamics to include enthalpy and Gibbs free
energy, and includes a serious discussion of random vs. coherent motion
including diffusion. The development of instructional materials is coordinated
with careful education research. Both the new content and the results of the
research are described in a series of papers for which this paper serves as an
overview and context.Comment: 12 page
A scoping review of comparisons between abstracts and full reports in primary biomedical research
Conflicts Of Interest And The Case Of Auditor Independence: Moral Seduction And Strategic Issue Cycling
Students’ reasoning about “high-energy bonds” and ATP: A vision of interdisciplinary education
As interdisciplinary courses are developed, instructors and researchers have to grapple with questions of how students should make connections across disciplines. We explore the issue of interdisciplinary reconciliation (IDR): how students reconcile seemingly contradictory ideas from different disciplines. While IDR has elements in common with other frameworks for the reconciliation of ideas across contexts, it differs in that each disciplinary idea is considered canonically correct within its own discipline. The setting for the research is an introductory physics course for biology majors that seeks to build greater interdisciplinary coherence and therefore includes biologically relevant topics such as adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and chemical bond energy. In our case-study data, students grapple with the apparent contradiction between the energy released when the phosphate bond in ATP is broken and the idea that an energy input is required to break a bond. We see students justifying context-dependent modeling choices, showing nuance in articulating how system choices may be related to disciplinary problems of interest. This represents a desired end point of IDR, in which students can build coherent connections between concepts from different disciplines while understanding each concept in its own disciplinary context. Our case study also illustrates elements of the instructional environment that play roles in the process of IDR
- …