Energy is a concept that spans all scientific disciplines. Therefore, a rigorous and flexible model for energy is essential for addressing a wide array of scientific, technological and social challenges. Because energy is so foundational, students should begin energy learning as early as possible and construct models and use representations that can build toward more sophisticated understandings over time. Further, since energy is an inherently abstract concept, it is important for students to "elaborate on their own energy ideas or findings and present them to others" (NRC, 2011). Such an early and responsive approach to energy teaching depends upon strategically designed curriculum and well-prepared teachers.

The Focus on Energy curriculum (https://focusonenergy.terc.edu) addresses the new science standards and is supported by teacher professional learning, online resources, and assessments. The curriculum uses an innovative approach to engage elementary students in learning about energy. Students go beyond simply identifying specific forms, transfers, and transformations; they learn to track energy flow through increasingly complex contexts ranging from ball collisions to solar panels. Students engage in a coherent sequence of activities, practice strategies for scientific discourse, and use a set of representational tools to reason about energy flow. These key features provide a framework and language that enable students to iteratively develop, elaborate and refine their scientific model for energy. 

Three short (4-5 session) curriculum units and an optional engineering design challenge include firsthand, guided explorations of energy in everyday phenomena. 

 The Motion and Elastic Energy unit introduces foundational energy ideas and representational tools. A short video collage of energy in everyday life anchors the unit. Students explore rolling and colliding balls on a track. They investigate springboard/pompom and propeller/elastic band systems and become familiar with Energy Tracking Lens questions and representations. These tools help them describe everyday phenomena in terms of energy.

 The Thermal Energy extends the Energy Tracking Lens framework and representations to investigate thermal phenomena. They collect temperature data and reason about increases and decreases of thermal energy and energy transfer between objects and to the environment.

 In the Electrical Energy Unit, students explore energy transfer to a propeller using a hand-crank generator, a solar panel, and a capacitor. By the end of the unit, students have developed and are able to use a model of energy to reason about energy flow in contexts they encounter in everyday life, from whistling tea kettles and windmills to birds on the wing.

The Focus on Energy Project team members were successful in soliciting, listening to, and engaging with teacher ideas. The result was a truly collaborative effort with far reaching impact and significance.

The project directly impacted several cohorts of participating teachers who:

• are better prepared to engage their students in the study of energy as envisioned in the Next Generation Science Standards;
• are empowered to teach science as a process of inquiry which builds upon the experiences and intellectual resources of their students;
• can provide their students with representational strategies to track the flow of energy in multidisciplinary contexts;
• have demonstrated a readiness to take on leadership roles as science educators; (One teacher in particular is now teaching a science methods course for a local university.)
• have online access to curricular resources which support ambitious energy learning at the elementary level.

These impacts and findings extend beyond the participating teachers to their students and their colleagues. The project also added to scholarship on teacher education by:

• analyzing elementary student ideas about energy conservation and energy dissipation
• developing and testing a new energy curriculum for elementary learners
• providing energy-specific instructional strategies for teachers at all levels
• articulating the need for professional development that attends to and builds from teachers' own science ideas
• identifying barriers and pressures which make responsive instructional practice challenging for teachers to enact.

 The Focus on Energy project extends our understanding of what energy learning is possible in elementary school.  There has been a great deal of debate about the readiness of elementary students to learn about the abstract model of energy. Because energy is an abstract concept, reasoning about it requires sophisticated science practices, particularly in the area of model-based reasoning. Moreover, since energy reasoning is fundamentally a matter of quantitative accounting, it was far from clear that children in fourth or fifth grade, with a limited mathematical toolkit, could engage in it successfully. Our results provide strong evidence that, with appropriate guidance and support and adequate teacher preparation, elementary students of diverse backgrounds can and do engage effectively in those practices and make striking gains in understanding and using key foundational energy ideas. We believe that the strong foundation in energy reasoning developed in Focus on Energy will provide students with the groundwork to master those concepts in future grades.

Last Modified: 12/29/2020
Modified by: Sara J Lacy