Abstract
Energy is a difficult concept to be understood by students of all levels. Thus, the aim of the study is to determine how high school students at different levels perceive the energy and related concepts. In line with this purpose, 173 students in total of which 57 ones of the 9th grade, 94 ones of the 10th grade and 22 ones of the 11th grade participated in the study in which developmental research method of descriptive research design has been conducted. Four open-ended questions about energy and related concepts have been asked to the students in the study. As a result of the study, it is concluded that the students use energy instead of work, power, repulsion and pulling concepts and they consider energy as a feature specific to living creatures and moving situations. The potential and kinetic energy types are most expressed ones. The students frequently give examples from renewable and non-renewable energy types and they classify them accordingly. It is also concluded that they don't have enough information about conservation of energy. It is thought that this misconception among the students emerges because energy and related concepts are taught them disconnected in different lessons of different disciplines and they do not understand preconceptions about energy and related notions. It is considered that the concept networks, concept maps, and conceptual change texts will help to relate energy concepts in students' minds.
Highlights
The learning of different concepts under the influence of being out of school or the environment constitutes the basis of learning
Taking into consideration that the first phase to prevent these hardships is to determine existing ones and specify development of them according to different grade levels, it is aimed to determine misconceptions of energy and related concepts developmentally depending on different grades in this study
The number of students who respond correctly or partially correct is increasing too. Some reasons of this situation are that misconceptions decrease as a result of learning physics concepts in progressing classes and similar concepts are taught in different lessons
Summary
The learning of different concepts under the influence of being out of school or the environment constitutes the basis of learning. As a result of learning concepts in schools, while some old knowledge overlaps with scientific knowledge, some do not do so. An imbalance appears because of existing knowledge in individual's mind and a contradiction emerges [7]. It is known that current knowledge can sometimes lead to some misconceptions while learning new information [8, 9]. New knowledge learned in mind can be shaped to include misconceptions. The wrong knowledge learned in some cases continues throughout the life of the individual and, the misconceptions persist even at university level studies [10, 11, 12, 13]. The first study to be done to change this knowledge aims to determine what misconceptions exist and to suggest solutions to it
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