Bill was a a year 7 student who participated in the Understanding Science Project.
Bill was telling me about work he had done in his science class on the states of matter, and what happened to the particles that made up objects during a change of state. He suggested that "when a solid goes to a liquid, the heat gives the particles energy to spread about, and then when its a liquid, it’s got even more energy to spread out into a gas". Later in the interview I followed up to find out what Bill understood by heat:
Now you mentioned earlier, something about heat. When you were talking about the experiment you did.
Yeah.
Yeah. So tell me about the heat again, what’s, how does the heat get involved in this solids liquids and gases?
When I heat, when heat comes to a solid, it will have, erm, a point where it will go down to a liquid,
Okay,
A melting points of the, the object.
Do you know what heat is. If you had a younger brother or sister, and they said to you, you are good at science, what’s heat?
I’m not sure how I can explain it, ‘cause it’s, it can be measured at different temperature, it can be measured at temperature, erm, by degrees Celsius, degrees Fahrenheit, and - I’m not really sure how I could explain what it is, but, I know it can be measured and changed.
So is it the same thing as temperature, do you think, or is it something different?
Erm, I think temperature is measuring the heat of something.
So they’re related, they’re to do with each other?
Yeah.
But they are not exactly the same?
No.
Bill appreciated that heat and temperature were not the same, but was not entirely clear on the relationship. Distinguishing between heat and temperature is a recognised challenge in teaching and learning physics.
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Dr Keith S Taber kst24@cam.ac.uk
University of Cambridge Faculty of Education
© Keith S Taber, 2013