Energy Transferred by Working
Electricity and Magnetism

Thinking about actions to take: Efficiency and Calculations

Teaching Guidance for 14-16 Supporting Physics Teaching

There's a good chance you could improve your teaching if you were to:

Try these

  • using efficiency as a technical term, perhaps reserving effectiveness for the more general idea of getting stuff done well
  • using apparatus, words and diagrams together to develop accounts
  • developing physical descriptions before accounts that use energy and power
  • emphasising the practical consequences of calculations with power and energy

Teacher Tip: Work through the Physics Narrative to find these lines of thinking worked out and then look in the Teaching Approaches for some examples of activities.

Avoid these

  • calculating without sharing the purpose of the calculations
  • running together different steps of multi-step arguments
  • confusing snapshots with processes

Teacher Tip: These difficulties are distilled from: the research findings; the practice of well-connected teachers with expertise; issues intrinsic to representing the physics well.

Energy Transferred by Working
appears in the relation dU=dQ+dW
is used in analyses relating to Working Engines Thermionic Emission
is a special case of Work
has the special case Potential Energy Kinetic Energy
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