Supporting learning about energy with fields: Evidence from a mixed-methods study

Energy is one important concept in physics, but science education research has repeatedly shown that students struggle to develop a full understanding of energy. Especially challenging for students is the notion of potential energy. Overwhelmed by the sheer number of potential energy forms, students struggle to make connections between them. Students often struggle to develop a conceptual understanding of potential energy, resulting in difficulties in learning about energy in general and their continued learning about energy. To address this issue, scholars have proposed incorporating fields into energy instruction. Through fields, the various forms of potential energy can be connected and synthesized into two simple underlying principles: (1) fields mediate interaction-at-a-distance and (2) the energy is stored in a field with the amount of energy depending on the configuration of the objects. Recent studies suggest that incorporating fields in middle school energy instruction is feasible and effective; however, little is known about whether and how middle school students connect energy and fields ideas to benefit their learning. In response to this research gap, we developed a unit on energy with fields and a comparable unit without fields and compared students' learning on energy in these two units. In a mixed-methods approach, we examined students' learning on energy during an introductory and a continued learning unit on energy with N = 67 students from grade 7. Our findings suggest that students who learned about energy with fields outperformed students who learned about energy without fields. Furthermore, fields-based energy instruction seemed to support students in developing better-connected knowledge networks that reflect deeper conceptual understanding of energy. Our findings suggest that incorporating fields into energy instruction could help students to better understand energy and to better continue learning about energy.