Ionising Radiation
Quantum and Nuclear
Thinking about actions to take: Sources of Ionising Radiation
Teaching Guidance
for 14-16
There's a good chance you could improve your teaching if you were to:
Try these
- dealing with the properties of ionising radiations before dealing with the sources
- building up a simplified model of the atom, as needed
- introducing a wide variety of sources, not only nuclear
- building and discussing models of exponential decay
- relating emissions to transmutations
- exploiting a good model of energy, discussing changes in the nuclear store
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
- not drawing attention to the vastly different energies of photons with nuclear and atomic origins
- not emphasising the nuclear origins of the ionising emissions
- using the term
atomic power
- keeping the different representations of exponential decay separate, rather than relating them
- avoiding
negative energy
, when accounting for nuclear transformations
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.