Energy Transferred by Heating
Energy and Thermal Physics

Thinking about actions to take: Warming and Cooling

Teaching Guidance for 11-14 Supporting Physics Teaching

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

Try these

  • using the idea of a thermal store as the basis for exploring temperature
  • explicitly describing where the energy is before and after a process

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

  • heat rises
  • conflating power and energy
  • mixing up descriptions about processes with those about snapshots, which define the beginning and end of the process

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.

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