Addressing alternative ideas held by biology students about energy

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to analyze the incidence of didactic strategies in the use of alternative ideas of first year Biology students of the Saturday shift of the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN-Managua) on the concepts of energy. The research has a qualitative, descriptive, prospective and cross-sectional approach, where a questionnaire was applied as a pre-test and post-test to a sample of 33 students enrolled in the course of Introduction to Physics. The results indicate that the use of didactic strategies had a positive impact on the students’ learning, since they were able to modify to a great extent the alternative ideas they presented at the beginning of Unit III: Energy. In addition, they were able to understand the concept of energy and its properties from a scientific perspective. On the other hand, despite the instruction process there is a percentage of students who still manifest alternative ideas about energy, such as: Energy is created, energy is the capacity that a body has to do work, heat is energy, energy is lost, among others. This indicates that alternative ideas are resistant to change because they are deeply rooted in the individual.