Pupils’ Preconceptions About Heat, Temperature and Energy

Abstract This article is focused on finding out pupils’ preconceptions about heat, temperature and energy. As a research tool we used a didactic test with individual types of tasks about the concepts. A total of 122 respondents aged 12 to 14 participated in the research. The research sample consisted of two groups of pupils. One group consisted of pupils attending a school assigned for talented pupils, for simplicity they are referred as talented pupils. The second group consisted of pupils who do not attend this type of school, we marked them as “general population”. The number of respondents in the sample of talented pupils was 54. The number of respondents in the sample “general population” was 68 pupils. In the research we compared ideas about concepts heat, temperature and energy of talented pupils and pupils of the “general population”. We also compared talented pupils and pupils of the “general population” in solving of conceptual and algorithmic tasks in didactic test. We found out pupils of the age from 12 to 14 have misconceptions about the concepts. We also identified the misconceptions and the most common are also mentioned in this article.