Energy

Abstract

Energy is a concept that is central to all science disciplines and has a broader societal, economic, and political relevance beyond science. Energy is also fundamentally a physics concept and, accordingly, a core concept in physics instruction. Understanding energy is important both to those who are looking to become physicists as well as those who seek to contribute to society in other ways. In this chapter, we start with a discussion of the concept of energy and its role in physics. Subsequently, we review the extensive research into the learning and teaching of energy. This review begins with research into student learning about energy in physics, from the early research on students' conceptions of energy to more recent work on learning progressions. We continue with an overview of different proposed approaches to teaching energy, beginning with the issue of when and how to teach the energy concept and culminating in a review of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of alternatives approaches to energy instruction. We conclude by reviewing work that has focused on how to support students' learning about energy using different conceptual tools. Finally, we provide a synthesis of existing work and identify for areas future physics education research.