This project is a collaborative effort involving scientists, science educators, and teachers from TERC, Clark University, Tufts University,and the Brookline and Somerville, MA schools that aims to develop a grade 3-5 Learning Progression that will provide a coherent approach to teaching energy in elementary school and lay a strong foundation for further learning in middle school. The work draws on and complements the learning progression and curriculum for matter being developed and tested in the Inquiry Project (NSF award 0628245). The project will identify a network of core concepts and principles about energy that are fundamental and general enough to be compatible with scientific ideas about energy, yet within reach of 5th graders.
This project explores the hypothesis that, while the scientific concept of energy is too abstract and difficult to understand in early grades, useful foundations can be established early on by elaborating a learning progression for energy. Clinical interviews will be administered to 24 pairs of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders recruited from urban after-school programs, to identify precursors to the core ideas as well obstacles to learning them. This research will help the investigators design key learning experiences that could allow students to progress from initial ideas toward a scientific understanding of energy. Those learning designs will then be tested in teaching interviews with 3 small groups of students in the same settings.
The result of the project will be an outline for a grade 3-5 learning progression for energy taking into account the project research findings as well as relevant standards, curricula, and science education literature.
Under a grant for exploratory research, Rethinking How to Teach Energy: Laying the Foundation in Elementary School (NSF Grants 1020020 and 1020013, 10/1/10 – 8/31/13, PIs Sara Lacy and Marianne Wiser), we have developed a general framework for thinking about the goals of pre-college energy education and a detailed learning progression for Grades 3-5 based on a review of existing literature of children’s understanding of energy, national standards, and existing curricula, combined with exploratory teaching and clinical interviews with 3rd and 5th grade students, classroom pilots of selected activities, and workshops for teachers (Tobin et al., 2012). The learning progression articulates how specific learning experiences can promote the progressive transformation and integration of students’ ideas about energy from Grade 3 to Grade 5. We have identified foundational ideas and practices that are central to a scientific understanding of energy, essential for an informed citizen, and can progressively and meaningfully evolve during the primary grades. We have identified and analyzed young students’ energy related ideas; some ideas constitute important roadblocks if curricula do not account for them, but they can also be important resources for learning if curricula are designed to exploit them. We have developed and tested, through exploratory interviews and classroom investigations, a series of key learning experiences that promote the progressive development of students’ energy related ideas. As a result of this work, we have concluded that energy education can productively focus on how scientists use a framework that we call the "Energy Lens" to examine a broad range of phenomena in terms of energy. This approach shows promise for helping students restructure their ideas about energy and preparing them for further instruction and learning in middle school. In pilot classroom activities led by researchers, 3rd and 5th grade students began to develop language, representations, and habits of mind that enabled them to adopt a model of energy as something that manifests itself in different forms and to associate energy increases with energy decreases (Lacy, Tobin, Wiser & Crissman, 2013), a model that paves the way to understanding energy transfer and, eventually, energy conservation. This research identifying children’s energy ideas and productive and engaging activities for elementary students lays the groundwork for future development of curriculum, assessment, and professional development resources.
