Abstract
The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of the conventional high school instruction about conservation of mechanical energy in Canton Sarajevo. To that end we tested 441 high school students from six different schools in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) for their competence to apply the law of conservation of mechanical energy. Concretely, students were expected to solve 5 open-ended tasks that covered conceptually different situations. In each task we asked a set of sub-questions to check whether the students possess all the prerequisite sub-competencies for systematic reasoning about conservation of mechanical energy. In addition, we investigated how students’ ideas about conservation of mechanical energy were affected by the choice of the physical system, as well as by the choice of the observed time interval. Data analysis was performed on the level of individual tasks. The students’ written answers were analyzed and the frequencies of most prominent student responses were reported. Generally, it has been shown that most high school students from Sarajevo fail to identify and distinguish internal, external, conservative and non-conservative forces. Also, many students think that applicability of the conservation law does not depend on the chosen physical system and its evolution over time. We could conclude that high school students’ use of the conservation law is mostly based on remembering similar problem solving experiences, rather than on relevant strategic knowledge.
Highlights
Nowadays, physics curricula are often built around so-called key physical concepts, i.e. concepts that are relevant for developing understanding in all areas of physics (Hertel & Grossmann, 2016)
In this study we attempted to investigate to what extent high school students from Canton Sarajevo develop sub-competencies that are prerequisite for applying law of conservation of mechanical energy (LCME)
It has been found that most high school students from Canton Sarajevo do not effectively distinguish internal, external, conservative and nonconservative forces
Summary
Physics curricula are often built around so-called key physical concepts, i.e. concepts that are relevant for developing understanding in all areas of physics (Hertel & Grossmann, 2016) One such concept is energy, and an important aspect of the competence to use the energy concept is applying the law of conservation of energy (Chen, Eisenkraft, Fortus, Krajcik, Neumann, Nordine & Scheff, 2014). Becoming proficient in applying the law of conservation of mechanical energy can help students to solve problems easier that would be relatively difficult to solve if analyzed from the perspective of Newton’s second law Such problems often include time-dependent forces or motion along arbitrary trajectories, which makes their mathematical treatment rather complex. It has been shown that students often struggle with choosing a physical system for which the conservation law can be applied (Lindsey, Heron & Schaffer 2012; Van Huis & Van den Berg, 1993), as well as with understanding the notion of an isolated system
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