Addressing undergraduate students’ difficulty in learning the Generalized Work-Energy Principle in introductory Mechanic

Abstract

Abstract In this contribution, we report the implementation and evaluation of a interactive Teaching Learning Sequence (TLS) introducing the concepts of Work, energy and the relations between them. The sequence has been designed with the Design Based Research (DBR) methodology. In order to analyse the effectiveness of the Sequence for students to be able to achieve the set learning goals, a pre-post test was designed. We was given the questionnaires, over two academic years (14/15 and 16/17), to about 170 students who attended the introductory physics course for the first engineering degree. Our findings show that the majority of experimental students’ progress from particular cases of the relation between work and energy towards an explanatory general relation between work and energy. We discuss implications of our findings in relation to teaching work and energy in introductory physics courses