This is the new updated edition of the first book in the bestselling Uncovering Student Ideas in Science series. Like the first edition of volume 1, this book helps pinpoint what your students know (or think they know) so you can monitor their learning and adjust your teaching accordingly. Loaded with classroom-friendly features you can use immediately, the book includes 25 “probes”—brief, easily administered formative assessments designed to understand your students’ thinking about 60 core science concepts.

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The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about thermal energy. The probe is designed to find out whether students think cold things can have energy.

Opposing Views

energy, heat, temperature, thermal energy, transfer of energy

The best answer is Ted’s: “The very cold water had energy. The Sun provided additional energy to warm the water.” Under ordinary conditions, all objects, materials, and substances “possess” an internal energy called thermal energy. Even very cold objects like ice cubes have thermal energy. The thermal energy of the water is the total of all the kinetic energy (due to molecular motion) and potential energy (because of relative position or shape of the molecules) in the bowl of water. Molecules are in constant motion, even in very cold water. The difference is that the molecules in the cold water move slower than the molecules in warm water. The cold water has less thermal energy before it is warmed by the Sun, but nevertheless it still has some thermal energy even at a cold temperature. The Sun warms the water by transferring energy from the Sun to the cold water. The gain in energy changes the amount of thermal energy the water has. As the water molecules gain energy, they move faster and the water temperature increases. Both the cold and warm water have energy; however, the bowl of water has more thermal energy when it is warm than when it is cold.

Temperature, heat, and thermal energy (sometimes referred to with younger students as heat energy) are related terms that are often confused. Temperature is the measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles that make up objects or materials. Heat is the amount of thermal energy that is transferred between two objects or materials because of a temperature difference. In other words, heat is thermal energy in transition as opposed to “stored” thermal energy. Thermal energy is the amount of internal kinetic and potential energy in an object or material. For example, the thermal energy of a massive iceberg will be much larger than that of a cup of boiling water, despite its much lower temperature, simply because it has more molecules.

Elementary Students

In the elementary grades, energy is a complex concept. Even though students have heard the word energy, investing a lot of time and effort in developing formal energy concepts should wait until middle school (AAAS 1993). Young children have intuitive notions about energy (e.g., energy gets things done) that teachers can build on without getting into details of formal energy concepts. At this level, students can talk about energy but should not be expected to define it. One aspect of energy that can be developed at this age is the idea of heat. Students can observe how heat spreads from one object or place to another and can consider ways to increase or decrease the spreading of heat. They should also be encouraged to wonder where the energy comes from that makes things happen.

Middle School Students

In the middle grades, students are introduced to energy through energy transformations and transfer. At this level, they describe various forms of energy including chemical, thermal, electrical, mechanical, electromagnetic, gravitational potential, elastic potential, and kinetic energy. They trace where forms of energy come from and where the energy goes. By grade 8, they should transition from using the commonly used term heat energy to describe an object’s internal energy to using the scientific term thermal energy. However, students at this level still have difficulty distinguishing among heat, thermal energy, and temperature.

High School Students

Students at the high school level take the variety of energy forms described in middle school and begin to see that they fall into a few basic types: kinetic energy, potential energy, or energy contained by a field such as electromagnetic waves. An increased understanding of temperature, atoms, and molecules helps them relate the motion of molecules, as well as the position and shape of molecules, to the concept of thermal energy. They should have a variety of opportunities to investigate how energy interacts with matter either by losing or by gaining energy. At this level, students are now able to see how powerful energy ideas are in explaining phenomena. Even though they are introduced to the theoretical idea of “absolute zero” as the temperature at which molecular motion ceases, some high school students may believe that cold water has energy but not accept the idea that ice has energy.

As an assessment used to inform instruction, this probe is best used with middle and high school students to find out their ideas about what they commonly refer to as heat energy before formally encountering the term thermal energy. You might consider including the temperature of the water. For example, explain that the cold water is 4°C and warms up to 30°C in the sun. A variation of this probe that would include phase change is to use an example of a glass of ice cubes at 0°C and the same glass after the ice cubes have melted in the sun. Although some students may think the water has energy, they may think that a frozen solid does not have energy. Some students may also think a temperature of 0°C may mean zero energy.

• Students’ meanings for energy, both before and after traditional instruction, are considerably different from the scientific meaning of energy (AAAS 1993).
• Several studies have found students to have an anthropomorphic view of energy. Students tend to associate energy with living things—in particular, human beings—or with objects that were treated as if they had human characteristics. They suggest that energy is needed to live or be active, or they relate it to fitness and strength (Driver et al. 1994).
• Many students think of energy as a substance that is stored in some objects but not in others (Driver et al. 1994).
• Distinguishing between concepts of heat and temperature is difficult for most children. They tend to view temperature as the mixture of hot and cold inside an object or simply the measure of the amount of thermal energy (often referred to as “heat energy” with younger children) possessed by an object with no distinction between the temperature of an object and its thermal energy. Studies show that students ages 10–16 tend to think there is no difference between heat and temperature (Driver et al. 1994).
• Watts and Gilbert (1985) found that it was common for 14- to 17-year-olds to associate heat only with warm and hot bodies.

American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 2007. Atlas of science literacy. Vol. 2. (See “Energy Transformations,” pp. 24–25.) Washington, DC: AAAS.

National Science Teachers Association. 2006. NSTA Energy SciPack. Online at http://learningcenter. nsta.org/product_detail.aspx?id=10.2505/6/ SCP-OCW.0.1

Robertson, W. 2002. Energy: Stop faking it! Finally understanding science so you can teach it. Arlington, VA: NSTA Press.

Robertson, W. 2007. Science 101: What exactly is energy? Science & Children (Mar.): 62–63.

• Although the word energy is familiar to students, energy is far more difficult to teach than is often recognized. In science, energy is an abstract, mathematical idea. It is hard to define energy or even to explain clearly what is meant by the word. This means that in order to communicate the scientific idea of energy to students, teachers must first simplify it—but still ensure that what is taught is clear and useful and provides a sound basis for developing a fuller understanding later (Millar 2005).
• The word energy is widely used in everyday contexts, including many that appear “scientific.” However, energy is used in a way that is less precise than its scientific meaning and that differs from its scientific meaning in certain respects. This means that teachers have to be very careful to disentangle the everyday use of the word energy from its scientific use in order to both keep teachers’ and students’ own ideas clear and avoid teaching a potentially confusing mixture of the two (Millar 2005).
• Ask students to write three to four sentences showing how they would use the word energy. Their responses often reveal what types of things they associate energy with.
• Be aware that teaching students to distinguish between heat and temperature is not a “quick fix.” Researchers have found that long-term teaching interventions are required for upper middle school students to start differentiating between the two concepts (Linn and Songer 1991).
• A suggested progression of ideas on understanding energy begins in elementary grades with observable patterns of phenomena involving heat transfer. In middle school, teaching and learning move to descriptions of various forms of energy and examples of energy transfer and transformation. High school learning culminates with an understanding of energy conservation and dissipation as thermal energy (AAAS 2007).
• When teaching ideas that are related to energy transfer, help students define the system under consideration. Because systems often interact with their environment, students should practice keeping track of what enters or leaves the system (AAAS 2007).