Özet:

Abstract In this study, we investigated students’ understanding about conservation of mechanical energy. For that purpose, we developed a survey with 14 multiple-choice questions that covered a variety of conceptually different problem situations. The survey has been administered to a sample of high school and university students who already had received conventional instruction about conservation of mechanical energy. Concretely, the sample consisted of 138 students from University of Zagreb (Croatia), and 115 high school students from two different schools in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina). It has been shown that many high school and university students associate conservation of mechanical energy with certain surface features of physical problems (e.g., “pulley problems”), instead to reason about the processes a physical system undergoes over the time. Students often mix mechanical energy conservation with energy conservation in general, and sometimes do not recognize that collisions of everyday objects necessarily include conversion of mechanical energy into internal thermal energy. Generally, the developed instrument proved to be powerful when it comes to detecting students’ misconceptions. We could conclude that conventional energy instruction based on solving a large number of standard, quantitative problems largely fails to facilitate development of deep understanding about conservation of mechanical energy.

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