Conceptions Of Energy Research Articles

Diagnostic Instruments of Four-Tier Test Work and Energy (FORTUNE) to Identify The Level of Students’ Conceptions

This study aims to develop and examine students' conceptions of Work and Energy in relation to the Indonesian Capital City in East Kalimantan, using the Four-Tier Test of Work and Energy (FORTUNE) Open-Ended. The 4D methodology was followed, involving defining, designing, developing, and disseminating the research. The FORTUNE test, comprising 13 questions, was administered to 70 tenth-grade students (44 girls and 26 boys) aged 15 to 16. Rasch analysis was applied to categorize student responses into seven distinct categories: Sound Understanding (SU), Partial Positive (PP), Partial Neutral (P0), Partial Negative (PN), Misconception (MC), No Understanding (NU), and No Coding (NC). The results revealed that FORTUNE effectively diagnosed students' conceptions, with 61% of responses falling into the Misconception (MC) category, while only 3% were classified as Partial Positive (PP). Notably, students displayed misconceptions in questions of moderate difficulty, as indicated by Rasch analysis. In conclusion, this study successfully developed and implemented the FORTUNE Open-Ended test to assess students' conceptions of Work and Energy in the context of the Indonesian Capital City in East Kalimantan. The findings highlight the prevalence of misconceptions among students, particularly in questions of moderate difficulty. Addressing and rectifying these misconceptions require targeted instructional strategies to foster a deeper and more accurate understanding of the topic. Future research should explore the effectiveness of intervention programs aimed at enhancing students' conceptual understanding of Work and Energy.

Video between Architecture and Telepathy

On 6 January 1973, Chilean media artist Juan Downey exhibited Plato Now at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. A hybrid multichannel video installation and performance, this was Downey’s restaging of Plato’s Parable of the Cave—the “Now” registering what the myth might look like from the vantage of his own historical moment. And whereas Plato’s original operated through an inflexible division between the space of the mind and a derivative sensual reality, Plato Now explicitly sought to blur those philosophical lines by assembling a relay of invisible energies, brain waves, video signals, and telepathic communications, such that the space of mind and sensual reality became speculatively entangled. This article clarifies just how Plato Now did this, and situates its philosophical vision as a significant, if relatively unremarked, aesthetic prefiguration of the new materialist tendencies towards relationality, hybrid assemblages, and vibrant conceptions of energy and matter.

Animal Oil, Animal Blood: Energy, Metabolism, and Protecting the Seal Hunt in the North American Arctic as an Act of Colonial Resistance

Interrogating dominant conceptions of energy is an important practice in diversifying the field of the energy humanities. By including various understandings and definitions of energy in the field’s discussions, we can strive to reach a more culturally inclusive understanding of energy. This article proposes that emphasizing a singular conception of energy (petroleum) is socially harmful and leads to inconsistent policies surrounding the trade of energy sources. Specifically, the essay examines the 2009 European Union trade ban on seal products, which continues to adversely affect Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic by limiting the financial viability of the subsistence seal hunt. The ban occurs while the potential of oil development in the waters surrounding Nunavut is consistently reviewed and examined by the Canadian government, demonstrating bias in which voices are amplified in discussions of energy-related policy during the early twenty-first century. To fully demonstrate the connection between subsistence sealing and oil development, the essay interrogates dominant conceptions of energy and reframes energy narratives. This reframing is compared to historical formations of energetic sources that proved more fluid and less centered on a single source. The discussion identifies Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s 2016 film Angry Inuk as a central activist text that supports a reinsertion of Inuit perspectives into policy decisions regarding the seal hunt. Furthermore, the film aids in understanding the impact of unilateral energy formations by contesting the 2009 seal trade ban and discussing the subsequent cultural harm. Throughout the essay, the reader is asked to consider in what forms energy appears, as well as the importance of acknowledging the many forms through which energy arises. This leads us to understand that energy formations are reflective of the culture in which they are built, and that restricting the trade of energy is harmful to cultures and communities.

Students’ Conception of Heat Energy in Senior Secondary School Physics

The purpose of the study was to determine students’ conceptions of heat energy in senior secondary school physics. Three research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study. Ex-post facto research design was adopted for the study. The population of the study consisted of 6,270 senior secondary school two (SSS2) physics students in all the government owned educational secondary schools in Onitsha Education Zone in Nigeria. The sample size of the study comprised of 357 senior secondary two (SS2) students drawn from the population using multi-stage sampling procedure. Heat Energy Conception Test (HECT) which consists of 16 essay items was used as instrument for data collection. The reliability coefficient of 0.747 for the instrument was ascertained using Cronbach Alpha. Frequency and percentage were used to answer research question one and students’ responses were described based on research question two. Chi-square was used in testing the two null hypotheses of the study at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study showed that the level of students’ conception is low; only 5.6% have Sound Conception, 6.7% have Partial Conception, 13.7% have Alternative Conception while 74% have No Conception. Based on the findings of the study, recommendations were made.

Frames, fantasies, and culture: Applying and comparing different methodologies for identifying energy imaginaries in American policy discourse

Although energy imaginaries are increasingly the focus of empirical study, little research has explored the methodological complications associated with studying imaginaries as an empirical concept. To help expand the methodological toolkit of energy imaginaries researchers, this paper examined whether systematic methods of identifying energy imaginaries in policy discourse could be constructed from the operationalizable components of three imaginary cognates—frames, fantasies, and cultural models—and how the visions uncovered by these methods resemble and deviate from each other. The case study research applied frame analysis, rhetorical analysis, and conventional discourse analysis to a single sample of energy policy documents published in Maine (United States) between 1996 and 2019 to discover potential commonalities and synergies among the results, and to shed light on the unique strengths, shortcomings, and limitations of the imaginary identification approaches. Similarities and differences in the results were analyzed and discussed in terms of three comparison criteria: number of unique visions detected, implicit moral values, and conceptions of renewable energy’s role in creating a desirable future. Results show an overall similarity and complementarity between the three analysis methods, but also reveal differences that suggest certain methods may be more suitable for specific types of studies and research questions.

Influence of Gender and Location on Students Conceptions of Heat Energy in Senior Secondary School Physics

Influence of Gender and Location on Students Conceptions of Heat Energy in Senior Secondary School Physics

Rebecca West, the Forgotten Vorticist?

The inclusion of Rebecca West's short story ‘Indissoluble Matrimony’ in the first issue of BLAST (1914) has much to tell us about the intellectual debts the Vorticist movement owed to West and to the feminist periodical culture with which she was associated. West composed her story in 1912–13, years when she was highly active as both contributor to and literary editor of Dora Marsden's The Freewoman (1911–12) and The New Freewoman (1913). In this article, I examine how the ‘energy’ promoted across BLAST aligned with feminist political conceptions of energy in Marsden's journals, and how these ideas were also shaped by early twentieth-century understandings of the universe, including theories of vortex motion, the ether, electromagnetism and thermodynamics. By paying close attention to the theme and metaphor of energy in ‘Indissoluble Matrimony’, this article traces patterns of influence between West, Marsden, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis that reveal intersections between avant-guerre feminism and the Vorticist avant-garde.

A web-based ionisation energy diagnostic instrument: exploiting the affordances of technology

The internet is prevalent in society today, and user-friendly web-based productivity tools are readily available for developing diagnostic instruments. This study sought to determine the affordances of a web-based diagnostic instrument on ionisation energy (wIEDI) based on the pen-and-paper version, the Ionisation Energy Diagnostic Instrument (IEDI) that was previously developed and reported on. The Google Forms platform was used to develop the wIEDI and it allowed a degree of personalisation such that specific second-tier options are offered in response to the student's choice of answer in the first tier. Students could choose one or more reasons in the second tier or supply their own reasons, and they were asked to indicate their confidence in their choice of answer–reason combinations. The wIEDI was administered to 274 A-level students (257 Grade 11 and 17 Grade 12), and answer–reason combinations indicating alternative conceptions were highlighted only if 5% or more students expressed confidence in them in the third-tier confidence measure. The results showed that all the possible alternative conceptions of ionisation energy reported in the previous study were also identified in the present study. Additional alternative conceptions were indicated as new reasons had to be developed for many items in the wIEDI to ensure that there were sufficient reasons for each first-tier response, and students were allowed to choose more than one reason for their answer. The wIEDI better facilitated responses reflecting the consistency of the use of specific ideas in student thinking and provided direct evidence of students’ possible manifold conceptions and thinking within each question as well as across a range of questions. It also allowed easy collation of the comments students typed in response to the ‘Others’ and ‘I do not know the answer’ options. Thus, the study makes a case for researchers and teachers using such technology in the diagnostic assessment of students.

Bodies and Energy, Circuits and Sound: Rethinking and Listening to Leon Ernest Eeman’s Relaxation Circuit with a Bio-synthesizer

Leon Ernest Eeman’s Cooperative Healing: The Curative Properties of Human Radiations (1947) documents decades of the author’s experiments with bio-circuits, beginning in 1919. Detailing the many configurations and uses of Eeman’s Relaxation Circuit, the book proposes that these circuits promote muscular relaxation, counter fatigue and disease, and stimulate activity by harnessing and circulating radiant energy from within the body. Using only electrical conductors and copper wire, the circuit connected subjects to themselves, redirecting energies internally, or in parallel with a number of subjects, sharing energy collectively. Eeman’s work explores the body as a kind of battery, working with configurations based on polarities—from head to toe and left to right. Although writing on Eeman is scarce, recent literature examining historical conceptions of energy and the body, including the work of Carolyn Thomas De La Peña, stress the importance of examining similar practices of energetic healing using bioelectricity as they inform our present relationships with technology, medicine, energy and the body. This paper will introduce Eeman’s work and discuss my artistic reenactment of the Relaxation Circuit as a participatory installation. This work, also entitled Relaxation Circuit, was presented in 2015 at Underbelly Arts Festival on Cockatoo Island in Sydney. The work recreated Eeman’s circuit for five participants with the addition of a bio-synthesizer, which included five oscillators modulated by the conductivity of each participant’s skin. In this reworking, participants were asked to lie in the circuit and listen to the amplified sounds of their collective bodies. This paper examines people’s experiences with bioelectricity in the work, both embodied and sonified.

Assessment of Students’ Scientific and Alternative Conceptions of Energy and Momentum Using Concentration Analysis

This study compares the scientific and alternative conceptions of energy and momentum of university first-year science students in Ethiopia and the US. Written data were collected using the Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey developed by Singh and Rosengrant. The Concentration Analysis statistical method was used for analysing the Ethiopian data from 72 students and extending the analysis of the American data from 352 students in the Singh and Rosengrant study. Low levels of scientific conceptions of students’ responses were identified for both groups of respondents. A three-level categorisation of students’ responses showed that the distribution of responses to 80% (ETH) and 52% (US) of the items represented the null-model or random state. The distribution of responses to 20% (ETH) and 48% (US) of the items represented the bi-model state and none of the items was responded to in a purely correct or alternative conception one-model state. The analysis of the data revealed a variety of students’ alternative conceptions and phenomenological primitives (p-prims) regarding energy and momentum. The findings imply that teachers should explore the use of the Concentration Analysis method in identifying alternative conceptions and p-prims in physics to support their students’ learning.

Towards a philosophy of energy

Transition to a sustainable energy regime is one of the key global societal challenges for the coming decades. Many technological innovations are in the pipeline, but an uncritical appraisal of anything and everything called green innovation lacks methods for testing both the necessity and the sufficiency of these developments. We propose to develop a philosophy of energy to fill this lacuna. Its task is to explore and clarify the space in which the so-called energy transition is taking place. This article sketches the fundaments of such a philosophy and suggests how it might be built upon the work of twentieth century critics of the functioning of energy in society, including Mumford, Bataille, and Heidegger; but not without empirical analysis of contemporary energy systems. Via the example of flux and potentiality - two apparently opposing conceptions of energy - we propose that a philosophy of energy allows for a broader perspective on specific problems in energy transition, and illuminates implicit and problematic assumptions behind these problems.

The Romantic machine: utopian science and technology after Napoleon

In the years immediately following Napoleon's defeat, French thinkers in all fields set their minds to the problem of how to recover from the long upheavals that had been set into motion by the French Revolution. Many challenged the Enlightenment's emphasis on mechanics and questioned the rising power of machines, seeking a return to the organic unity of an earlier age and triggering the artistic and philosophical movement of romanticism. Previous scholars have viewed romanticism and industrialization in opposition, but in this groundbreaking volume John Tresch reveals how thoroughly entwined science and the arts were in early nineteenth-century France and how they worked together to unite a fractured society. Focusing on a set of celebrated technologies, including steam engines, electromagnetic and geophysical instruments, early photography, and mass-scale printing, Tresch looks at how new conceptions of energy, instrumentality, and association fueled such diverse developments as fantastic literature, popular astronomy, grand opera, positivism, utopian socialism, and the Revolution of 1848. He shows that those who attempted to fuse organicism and mechanism in various ways, including Alexander von Humboldt and Auguste Comte, charted a road not taken that resonates today. Essential reading for historians of science, intellectual and cultural historians of Europe, and literary and art historians, The Romantic Machine is poised to profoundly alter our understanding of the scientific and cultural landscape of the early nineteenth century.

Using Metaphor Theory to Examine Conceptions of Energy in Biology, Chemistry, and Physics

Energy is one of the most important unifying themes in science. Yet the way energy is conceptualized varies depending on context. In this paper, the discourse used to explain the role of energy in systems from biology, chemistry, and physics is examined from the perspective of metaphor theory. Six substance metaphors for energy are identified in pedagogical discourse (i.e., textbooks and the science education literature): energy as a substance that can be accounted for, can flow, can be carried, can change forms, can be lost, and can be an ingredient, a product or stored in some way. Each of these conceptual metaphors highlight and obscure various characteristics of energy, and provide a set of frameworks that each afford a different understanding of the energy concept.

Healing, Mental Energy in the Physics Classroom: Energy Conceptions and Trust in Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Grade 10–12 Students

Lay conceptions of energy often conflict with scientific knowledge, hinder science learning and scientific literacy, and provide a basis for ungrounded beliefs. In a sample of Finnish upper secondary school students, energy was attributed with features of living and animate beings and thought of as a mental property. These ontologically confused conceptions (OCC) were associated with trust in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and independent of scientifically valid conceptions. Substance-based energy conceptions followed the correlational pattern of OCC, rather than scientific conceptions. OCC and CAM decreased both during the regular school physics curriculum and after a lesson targeted at the ontological confusions. OCC and CAM were slightly less common among students with high actively open-minded thinking, low trust in intuition and high need for cognition. The findings are discussed in relation to the goals of scientific education.

Using Student-Generated Analogies to Investigate Conceptions of Energy: A multidisciplinary study

The concept of energy is widely employed in introductory science courses. However, the term energy is defined and utilized in different ways depending on the context, even within a given discipline. Through the lens of metaphor theory, these various definitions of energy are seen as metaphors that highlight and obscure characteristics of energy. Working under this framework, undergraduate students in introductory biology, chemistry, and physics courses were asked to write analogies that reflect their understanding of the role of energy in the context of ecosystems (n = 49), chemical reactions (n = 36), mechanical systems (n = 65), and electrical circuits (n = 44). These analogies were analyzed qualitatively using metaphor theory to gain understanding of how students conceptualize energy in these different contexts. The results of this study indicate that students use seven different conceptual metaphors to explain the role of energy in various scientific contexts: energy as a substance that can be accounted for, energy as a substance that can flow, can change forms, can be carried, can be lost, can be an ingredient or a product, and energy as a process or interaction. This result gives teachers a framework to use in evaluating student ideas about energy.

Analysis of South African Grade 10 learners' conceptual resources regarding the concept of energy in physics

More than a thousand Grade 10 Physical Science learners from four South African provinces participated in a study that probed their conceptions of energy. The purpose was to determine the learners' conceptual resources, i.e. their initial conceptions, and identify the potentially productive resources from which they may construct physics concepts. The conceptions revealed by the learners in their responses to a questionnaire were categorised as core intuitive, implicit, conscious or verbal-symbolic. Notwithstanding learning the curriculum theme Energy and Change in their preceding school years, the results show that many of the learners have not yet mastered the concept of energy and related concepts ontologically well enough for progression to formal physics in the FET phase. However, their initial conceptions contain resources that can be refined to the science concepts. Implications and recommendations for learning and teaching in the FET phase are discussed in the framework of the conceptual refinement model.

Engineering Design and Conceptual Change in Science: Addressing thermal energy and heat transfer in eighth grade

The purpose of this research was to investigate the impact of engineering design classroom activities on middle‐school students’ conceptions of heat transfer and thermal energy. One eighth‐grade physical science teacher and the students in three of her classes participated in this mixed‐methods investigation. One class served as the control receiving the teacher’s typical instruction. Students in a second class had the same learning objectives, but were taught science through an engineering design curriculum that included demonstrations targeting specific alternative conceptions about heat transfer and thermal energy. A third class also used the engineering design curriculum, but students experienced typical demonstrations instead of targeted ones. Conceptual understandings of heat transfer and thermal energy and attitudes towards engineering were assessed prior to and after the interventions through interviews, observations, artefact analysis, a multiple choice assessment, and a Likert scale assessment. Results indicated that the engineering design curriculum with targeted demonstrations was significantly more effective in eliciting desired conceptual change than the typical instruction and also significantly more effective than the engineering curriculum without targeted demonstrations. Implications from this study can inform how teachers should be prepared to use engineering design activities in science classrooms for conceptual change.

The Ontological Problem with Sovereignty: Indigenous Nations, Territoriality, and the Making of Natural Resources in Alaska

Congressional resolution of Alaska Native land claims in the 1970s, driven by a discursive collusion of carbon crisis and neocolonial urgency to build the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, has created a substantively different legal and economic relationship between Alaskan indigenous nations and the state than that which exists for Lower 48 tribes. It has also resulted in increasingly intense inter-tribal and intra-organizational conflict over environmental governance, development, and energy, most recently culminating in a January 2009 heating oil crisis in rural villages throughout the state. In this paper, cultural conceptions of fossil energy held by young indigenous anti-development activists from Gwich’in and Koyukon tribal villages are contrasted with those held by energy analysts in Doyon, Ltd, interior Alaska’s largest regional Native corporation. The villages rejected the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and their citizen activists now provide counter-narratives of sovereignty and ‘natural resources’ that not only diverge from those held by Doyon members, but also illuminate indigenous diversity in conceptions of energy as category. Narratives of last winter’s rural crisis demonstrate how fossil energy is conceived of in culturally distinctive ways by Alaska Native environmental activists, policy makers, and energy analysts. Further, their evaluations of energy covary with diverse legal relationships between village governments, the corporations, and the state. By investigating fossil energy as a total social fact, critical ethnography can illuminate the multiple cultural understandings of relational sovereignty and energy that inform indigenous conflict in Alaska.

Intangible materialism: the body, scientific knowledge, and the power of language

Taking as his point of departure Norbert Weiner’s statement that information is basic to understanding materialism in our era, Ronald Schleifer shows how discoveries of modern physics have altered conceptions of matter and energy and the ways in which both information theory and the study of literature can enrich these conceptions. Expanding the reductive notion of “the material” as simply matter and energy, he formulates a new, more inclusive idea of materialism.Schleifer’s project attempts to bridge the divisions between the humanities and the sciences and to create a nonreductive materialism for the information age. He presents a materialistic account of human bodily experience by delving into language and literature that powerfully represents our faces, voices, hands, and pain. For example, he examines the material resources of poetic “literariness” as it is revealed in the condition of Tourette’s syndrome. Schleifer also investigates gestures of the hand in the formation of sociality, and he studies pain as both a physiological and phenomenological experience.This ambitious work explores physiological analyses, evolutionary explanations, and semiotic descriptions of materialism to reveal how aspects of physical existence discover meaning in experience.

Recovering True Selves in the Electro-Spiritual Field of Universal Love

ABSTRACT In Taiwan, the quasi-religious practice of Heqi reveals a complex relationship between the neoliberal demand for success; conceptions of energy and love; technologies of audio transmission; reception, and recording; and the production of modern selves. A transnational coalescence of psychoanalysis and Heqi as both theory and practice produces modern, properly cultured subjects fully in tune with the prevailing demands of global capitalism. Furthermore, these therapies and their explanatory discourses reflect, as much as they describe, globally salient audio technologies (such as radio).