The Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman once said “in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is.” It is not surprising then that there is a great deal of literature reporting that the concept of energy is confusing to science students, including those in chemistry. Even though energy is a difficult concept to understand, it is fundamental to making sense of how the world works. It is therefore important that we discover better ways of helping students develop a robust and coherent understanding of how energy is transferred and transformed. To this end, we explored how students understand interactions, an idea that is closely related to energy. When interactions form or break, the potential energy of the system changes. Previously, we developed a prompt and associated coding rubric to analyze how students explain the formation of London dispersion forces using causal mechanistic reasoning. This kind of reasoning is highly valued in science as it requires the learner to identify and unpack the unseen factors a scalar level below a phenomenon to explain how and why that phenomenon occurs. We have since developed a new analogous prompt and coding scheme asking students to explain the changes in potential energy associated with atoms experiencing London dispersion forces. In this presentation, we will discuss our results comparing the responses from a group of general chemistry students who received both prompts. The results of our analysis can inform the way we approach interactions and energy in our chemistry classrooms and to better support students’ understanding of some of the most important ideas in science.

Linking energy and interactions: Exploring students’ causal mechanistic explanations of London dispersion forces and changes in potential energy

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.