Energy transformations in primary school: outcomes from a research based experimentation

Energy is a topic which appears many times in Italian curricula. The school puts a strong socioeconomical attention to protection of the environment and experts often are invited to make speeches on this topic in primary classroom. This type of approaches are those of newspapers and the common language. A vast literature has highlighted those learning difficulties linked to common sense way of looking to energy concepts and its processing (Millar R. 2005, Heron P., Michelini M. and Stefanel A., 2008). Didactic proposals on energy topic of different approaches (Kaper, W. and Goedhart, M. 2002; Hobson A. 2004) offer to the teacher the opportunity to treat this topic revisiting concepts in such a way as to help children overcome the conceptual knots (Driver R. and Warrington L. 1985; Heron et. al. 2008) that the daily context poses. In a research based experimentation the HMS (HMS - Heron et. al. 2008) approach is adopted to build the concepts of energy by means of experimental exploration, and to complete a teaching of energy based on the content offered by text book: energy form, energy production. The experimental class includes twenty three 8-year-old children of a school of Perugia, Italy. HMS educational path has been applied using Inquiry based learning strategy and monitoring learning by means of boarding diary, in(I)-out(O)- and post(P)-tests (IOP tests). Some interesting elements emerge, especially concerning transformation concept, which appears in different key-situations explored.