Abstract
Pregraduate students often have low success expectations toward their thermodynamics courses, which are often considered too abstract and remarkably difficult to understand. For this reason, they may not even try to reach any level of comprehension while settling for reproducing mathematical calculations and memorizing definitions to pass the exams. Traditional lectures on thermodynamics, focusing on mathematical deductions while neglecting the qualitative characterization of the concepts behind the equations, do not help in this respect. Aiming at a change in the teaching practice and focused on the second law of thermodynamics, the main goals of this work are to characterize the way of reasoning of the expert; to present a review on the most important learning difficulties encountered by students and categorize them into three groups: the disregard of qualitative understanding, the inherent conceptual difficulties, and those related to the students’ previous knowledge; and to propose some suitable teaching practices to assist instructors in this difficult but rewarding task.
Highlights
The second law of thermodynamics (SLT) limits the direction of natural processes, which are only possible in the direction in which the entropy of the universe increases.This law applies to any process and explains in a remarkably simple way how the universe works
Reference [1] remarked its importance in his famous quote: “the law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. [ . . . ] if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation”
Thermodynamics is regarded by pregraduate students as a difficult topic, packed with complicated equations and abstract concepts
Summary
The second law of thermodynamics (SLT) limits the direction of natural processes, which are only possible in the direction in which the entropy of the universe increases. In order to avoid students’ misinterpretation of success, teaching staff should favor the deep understanding and assess coherently This obviously implies that exams must feature qualitative deductions along with numerical calculations, valuing critical thinking over memorization. These ways of thinking, characteristic of each discipline, are organized around certain key concepts that provide meaning to determined phenomena, observations, or practices, and that constitute the main structural nodes of the network of concepts that sustains the dialogue and research in the discipline [7,8] Characterizing this way of reasoning in a particular discipline is the starting point to analyze the difficulties impeding new learning and seeking the best way to teach a specific topic. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in Section 2, the expert way of thinking on the SLT is characterized; in Section 3, a compilation of the main learning difficulties on the SLT is given; and in Section 4, a proposal on suitable teaching practices is put forward
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