Teaching thermodynamics
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Abstract
unwittingly) as a result of their study. It may be that the misconceptions have occurred because, according LETTERS to Ausubel, new ideas have been presented to students without adequate attachment having been made to their existing corpus of knowledge. When students TEACHING THERMODYNAMICS are left to make their own links, they may make wrong assumptions or simplifications which they In recent years a number of textbooks on thermoabsorb. Such internalized ideas are difficult to disdynamics (of American origin or American inspired) lodge later. have given considerable emphasis to a new and It is intended to discuss these misconceptions in a restricted definition of the word ‘heat’. The actual full article in a forthcoming issue of Physics Educadefinition takes various forms. From some it appears tion so that school teachers may be made aware of that heat must now be considered solely as energy in their existence and take avoiding action and uni transit due to a temperature gradient and is not a versity teachers, forewarned, may be able to take form of energy that can exist inside a body. From sympathetic remedial measures. others that heat must be considered as an interaction between systems at different temperatures, the direction of the interaction being purely conventional or . . . AND PRESCRIPTIONS even metaphorical, Some definitions are so involved and obscurely worded as to be virtually incompreIn this issue ofPhysics Education we publish a number hensible. of articles relating to the teaching of thermodynamics. Here are some extracts from three books on therC B Spurgin points out some of the elementary errors modynamics which illustrate this: which occur in the teaching of temperature, particu‘ I f in a heat interaction between systems S, and larly at secondary level; and J Ogborn provides a s b , system S, is at the higher temperature, we say Socratic discussion on the first law of thermothat a “heat transfer” has taken place from S, to s b . dynamics, whose mythology, while considerable, The words “transfer”, “to” and “from” are metacannot be accredited to the Greeks. phorical’ (Spalding and Cole 1966 p89). The article by I F Roberts and D S Watts, together ‘Heat only has meaning when referred to the with the piece above by A H Johnstone, points out boundary of a system. It exists during the interaction the need for cooperation at secondary level between only’ (Spalding and Cole 1966 p92). physics teachers and chemistry teachers. Lack o f co‘ “Heat” is “something” which appears at the operation at that level causes confusion which is boundary when a system changes its state due to a unlikely to be repaired in students who do not go difference in temperature between the system and on to higher education; and i t is an obscene parody its surrounding. The “something” is a form of heat of the zeroth law of thermodynamics to expect that transfer’ (Rogers and Mayhew 1964). the subject can be artificially segregated at he ‘Heat is an interaction which may occur between secondary level and yet resolved with equanimity at two systems originally isolated and in stable equithe tertiary level. librium, when they are brought into communication. without altering their allowed states and without work being done by the environment’ (Hatsopoulos and Keenan 1965 p37).