期刊名称：Physical Review ST Physics Education Research
电子版ISSN：1554-9178
出版年度：2012
卷号：8
期号：2
页码：1-11
DOI：10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.8.020114
出版社：American Physical Society
摘要：The nature of energy is not typically an explicit topic of physics instruction. Nonetheless, verbal and graphical representations of energy articulate models in which energy is conceptualized as a quasimaterial substance, a stimulus, or a vertical location. We argue that a substance ontology for energy is particularly productive in developing understanding of energy transfers and transformations. We analyze classic representations of energy—bar charts, pie charts, and others—to determine the energy ontologies that are implicit in those representations, and thus their affordances for energy learning. We find that while existing representations partially support a substance ontology for energy and thus the learning goal of energy conservation, they have limited utility for tracking the flow of energy among objects.
