Appendix 16: Excerpts from Short Report Summarising
Data from T7
Background
She was a physicist of 28 years teaching experience. She was Head of Physics at a West London comprehensive school,
who also had responsibility for overseeing the mentoring of student and newly qualified teachers (NQT’s). Her school
had a high percentage of Asian pupils. She did not do a formal teacher training course but instead modules on
educational psychology, sociology and philosophy as part of her physics degree. She came into teaching in the 1970s
when, ‘they were so desperate for science teachers, that they were taking people on without doing a PGCE’.

She had worked as a physics consultant on the QCA (2000) schemes of work for KS3 and on the development of SATs
questions. She was a member of the PRI (Pupils’ Research Initiative – annual conference to which I was invited, 2000).
She taught A-level physics. Like many teachers, time was very valuable but she was willing to devote three morning
sessions to this case study, in her ‘NQT mentor’ protected free slot.

She was a member of the ASE and had been for many years. She also had close links with the Institute of Physics in
London, having worked with them in the past. She stated that she had closely followed ASE publications over the last
two decades and that energy was a special interest to her. Use of terms like ‘fuel-oxygen system’ reinforced this
awareness of the literature. Academic names such as ‘Novak’ and ‘Gowin’ were well known to her. In fact ‘Learning to
Learn’ (Novak and Gowin, 1984) was seen as a fundamental source for many of the contemporary ideas, such as
concept maps, that She had undertaken. She admitted to being a visual learner, preferring information in diagrams rather
than words. This may underpin a leaning towards concept maps. As evident from initial contact, she was a strong and
serious adherent to the contemporary model of energy transfers. This position had arose partly through reading the
literature and partly through teaching the topic, especially to older students.

She could not remember anything about energy transfers or transformations from her own schooling, making a joke that
the units – ‘ergs’ and ‘dynes’ were difficult to deal with. Her modern energy ideas were developed partly through
teaching and partly through reading the ASE literature.
Specific Areas of Conceptual Concern
When directly challenged on how to deal with the possible misconception that when a battery runs out that its energy is
destroyed and gone forever, She offered the solution of using a branching arrow (Sankey diagram) as described in Core
Science 1 If pupils could do this and appreciate the arrows then this was probably the best one could do – a visual
method. Also to remind pupils that, ‘the energy must still be there somewhere … it’s been transferred in a different way
which isn’t useful’. Finally, to reinforce with plenty of examples. On this aspect, She stated she was careful about
avoiding use of the phrase ‘energy is lost’. However, overall, She appeared skeptical about how far one could go on
energy dissipation with pupils at key stage three. Her most difficult aspect was finding some way to explain verbally
that although the energy was still there, it had been wasted / was not useful because you could not get at it. Examples
that involved sound or friction creating heating helped the credibility of the ideas of dissipation and conservation for
pupils in her view. However, she conjectured that only the highest level learners would get to appreciate this at a
particulate level and that on the whole, it was too hard for most key stage three pupils. She even joked that this was hard
for some science teachers. The Maxwell’s demon story about ‘gathering up energetic water molecules’ would be used,
but only with older pupils. A small substantiation was that energy dissipation was, after all, the second law of
thermodynamics which even her A-level physicists found hard. Thus she teaches energy dissipation more from the push
that it is on the key stage three programme of study, rather than from seeing a need in developing pupils’ early concepts
of energy.

She spontaneously offered that her pupils often held the misconception that foods such as fruit and vegetables have the
most energy because they are healthy, in contrast to fatty and starchy foods that have the highest calorific energies. They
thus did not ‘believe’ that to lose weight one had to limit fatty and starchy foods.

Other areas of concern, as stimulated by the PSTS replication interview situations were: Aerodynamics is not significant
below 50mph. An electric kettle may be called efficient because it is a closed system and heating is direct – but this does
not take into account the efficiency of the power station. Pupils have their own agendas and do not stick to the scientific
point if asked to do an energy audit on the glass versus paper milk container debate – they will say glass is bad because
it is dangerous when broken.

She was concerned with the use of the word ‘heat’ as presented in the literature. She was keen to see its use kept to
being a verb. However, as a compromise, she accepted the term ‘thermal energy’ to be synonymous with the more
formal ‘internal energy (U)’, because that is what the more modern books and SATs were requiring. However, she also
talked about Science Connections stating, ‘fuels transferring energy as thermal energy’. This implies the term thermal
energy is used to mean Q – energy transferred by heating. This ambiguity was not resolved.
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