How do students understand energy in biology, chemistry, and physics?: Development and validation of an assessment instrument

One major aim of education is to help students develop an integrated science understanding. Science standards identify core disciplinary ideas and cross-cutting concepts as a means to achieve this goal. Energy is a concept that is both a disciplinary core idea in biology, chemistry and physics, as well as a concept cutting across disciplinary contexts. In extension to previous, mostly discipline-specific studies on energy learning, this study aims to provide new insights to the yet little regarded cross-disciplinary aspect of energy understanding. The focus lies on the development and validation of an instrument to assess students’ energy understanding in the contexts of biology, chemistry, and physics. This new instrument has been administered in a cross-sectional study to N = 752 students at the end of grades 6, 8 and 10. The results suggest that the new instrument provides three reliable and discipline-specific subtests to assess students’ energy understanding. The findings also suggest similar progression trends in students’ energy understanding across the three disciplines. Discipline-specific differences in understanding were observed with respect to the four energy aspects forms, transfer, degradation, and conservation. The paper concludes with a discussion of the connection and integration of energy understanding across disciplines. Extensive information on progression patterns in specific contexts is provided as supplemental online material.