Diagnostic · Work, conservation, heat
Energy Diagnostic
Maps the substance view of energy and what follows from it: conservation conditions, transfer and transformation, heat and temperature. It shows which band to address first.
IB DP · AP · A-Level · GCSE / IGCSE
1
Forms
24
Questions
25–30
Minutes
11
Bands
FundaFirst HS diagnostics have run in classrooms at 10 schools · 9 countries · 3 continents
The wrong ideas come from physics education research, which has recorded them since the 1970s: Viennot, Trowbridge & McDermott, Arons, Hestenes, Maloney. The physics comes from Arons, Knight, Moore, and Chabay & Sherwood.
What it maps
Eleven misconception bands, from what energy is to heat and temperature.
E1
Substance vs Bookkeeping
Energy as a property of a state, against energy as stuff that flows or gets used up. Most of the other misconceptions grow from this one.
E2
Conservation Conditions
When mechanical energy is conserved, when the path does not matter, and when friction and other losses enter.
E3
Transfer vs Transformation
Energy moving between systems, against energy changing form inside one system. The substance view cannot tell the two apart.
E4
State vs Process
Energy as a scalar that belongs to a state. It is not a vector and it is not a process. Kept apart from momentum and from heat.
E5
PE Belongs to Interactions
Gravitational and elastic potential energy belong to a pair of objects that interact, and to neither one alone. Also the choice of reference and negative values.
E6
Work and Kinetic Energy
For a constant force, pseudowork is the component of the force along the displacement of the centre of mass, times that displacement. It is compared with the work done at the contact point. Forces that do no work.
E7
Hooke's Law & Spring PE
Length against extension, what the spring constant means, and a block dropped on a spring as a test of which tool students reach for.
E8
Qualitative Transformations
Following the energy through a chain of connected systems. Internal energy, thermal energy and heat kept apart.
E9
PE Diagram Reading
Stable and unstable equilibrium, shifting the potential-energy zero without changing the physics, turning points, and regions a particle cannot reach on a graph with several hills.
E10
Heat vs Temperature
Spotting heat described as something stored in an object, phase change at constant temperature, and the careful wording most textbooks do not keep to.
X1
The Friction Paradox
A block moves at constant velocity on a rough surface. Its kinetic energy does not change, yet thermal energy rises. A closing item that ties energy back to Newton’s laws.
A question from it
Students can do every energy calculation and still hold these ideas.
Energy as a substance the spring contains
Ask students what energy means for a stretched spring attached to a block. Many say it is something the spring contains and will hand over. This substance view is hard to shift because it works for most calculations. It falls apart as soon as energy changes form instead of moving from one object to another.
Where the gravitational PE belongs
A ball is held at height h above the ground. Ask where the gravitational potential energy belongs. Most students say the ball. Some say the Earth. It belongs to the ball and the Earth together, as a pair. Students who give it to the ball alone go on to draw the wrong system boundary in conservation problems.
The astronaut floor-jump
An astronaut in a space station pushes off the floor and gains kinetic energy. Ask where the energy came from. Most students say the floor did positive work, force times the displacement of the centre of mass. Treat the floor as fixed and rigid. The contact point does not move, so the floor does no real work. The kinetic energy came from chemical energy in the astronaut’s muscles.
Heat as a noun the kettle stores
Students, and most textbooks, talk about heat as if it were a substance. It flows, it is stored in objects, and it can be owned: “the heat in the water”, “the kettle stores heat”. Heat is a process. What an object holds is thermal energy. The wording matters, because the substance view of energy lives in it.
How it runs
Students use one shared link and need no logins.
24 questions, about 25–30 minutes, no calculator required, single sitting.
The report arrives within 48 hours of your class finishing.
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Arons and Knight document the misconceptions. Moore and Chabay & Sherwood supply the physics treatment.