Lane Seeley

Constructing a Sustainable Foundation for Thinking and Learning About Energy in the Twenty-First Century

Addressing the energy challenges of today and tomorrow will require energy experts in fields from municipal government to public health. These experts will need to draw from diverse, sophisticated, and nuanced understandings of energy in society that go far beyond static lists of energy facts. They will need to think and communicate using energy concepts that are rigorous, relevant, and fit known phenomena. Despite pervasive rhetoric (including in the Next Generation Science Standards) that energy is a unifying, crosscutting concept, historically energy instruction has been compartmentalized along disciplinary lines and appeared rigid. Students often associate the energy ideas they learn in school as a regimented program of taxonomy and bookkeeping. They understand their task as being to identify correctly forms and tabulate transfers and transformations. Students also learn a scientific concept of energy that is conserved; yet live in a world in which people are constantly ‘using up’ energy. We believe students can construct flexible, intuitive energy models that will empower them to make sense of phenomena, processes and resources that they care about in the real world by tracking energy transfers and transformations locally through detailed analysis of hypothesized mechanisms for such. We work with teachers to construct such models so that they can support similar energy engagement among their students.

The Intertwined Roles of Teacher Content Knowledge and Knowledge of Scientific Practices in Support of a Science Learning Community

In this chapter we envision the science classroom as an authentic scientific community. In this vision, student ideas can influence the trajectory of scientific investigation. Teachers serve as experts and guides, but they also can learn alongside their students. To do this, they need to listen to the students and be able to build on students’ original ideas to help them learn. What knowledge does a teacher draw on in such a classroom? In this chapter we empirically investigate some ways in which a teacher can utilize both knowledge of the subject matter and knowledge of science practices to respond productively to student thinking. We present data from a large study of knowledge for teaching energy. The subjects of this study were high school physics teachers. We found that in some instructional situations, teachers with insufficient content knowledge cannot productively respond to student reasoning. We also found cases where teachers can compensate for lack of content knowledge if they are skilled in science practices. To explain our findings, we hypothesize the existence of two types of content knowledge: foundational content knowledge and elaborative content knowledge. Furthermore, we suggest that foundational content knowledge along with knowledge of scientific practices can allow teachers to compensate for insufficient elaborative content knowledge. We discuss the implications of our hypothesis for future research and for the preparation and professional development of physics teachers.

Colliding without touching: Using magnets and copper pipe fittings to explore the energetics of a completely inelastic collision

This article describes a simple, inexpensive method for collecting force and motion data from a completely inelastic collision. We describe the use of an inductive magnetic interaction to produce a collision that involves no physical contact and occurs on a sufficiently slow time scale for detailed analysis. The resulting collision will be engaging for introductory high school or college students. We also describe intriguing and reproducible features of the time-dependent force interaction that student can explore in more advanced physics courses.