Abstract
We report on students’ thinking regarding entropy in an introductory calculus-based physics course. We analyzed students’ responses to a variety of questions on entropy changes of an arbitrarily defined system and its surroundings. In four offerings of the same course we found that before instruction, no more than 6% of all students could give completely correct responses to relevant questions posed in both general and concrete contexts. Nearly two-thirds of the students showed clear evidence of conservation-type reasoning regarding entropy. These outcomes were little changed even after instruction. Targeted instruction that guided students to recognize that entropy is not a conserved quantity appears to yield improved performance on qualitative questions related to this concept.
Highlights
In this paper we report on student ideas and learning difficulties related to certain aspects of the second law of thermodynamics and its relation to changes in entropy
The second law of thermodynamics limits the direction of any naturally occurring processes to those that cause an overall increase in the entropy of a system plus its surroundings
In this paper we explore student thinking on the idea that net entropy increase is a necessary outcome of any natural process
Summary
In this paper we report on student ideas and learning difficulties related to certain aspects of the second law of thermodynamics and its relation to changes in entropy. Some investigators have made preliminary studies of student thinking regarding the energy “degradation” aspect of the second law and notions of the unidirectionality of natural processes such as heat flow.. Kesidou and Duit interviewed 15- and 16-year-old students who had received 4 years of physics instruction and asked them questions on concepts related to the first and second laws of thermodynamics. They reported that after instruction, most students had ideas that processes tend to go in one direction only and that energy is in some sense “used up” or becomes less available. They found that for the most part, students did not perceive the connection between constraints on engine efficiencies and increases in total entropy of the system and its surroundings
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