Topic: Students’ Alternative Concepts in Heat and Thermodynamics

A graduate course conducted by our Ex-director Prof. Arvind Kumar inspired me to take up this topic for research. Prof. H. C. Pradhan is my thesis advisor.

We started with some preliminary studies in this topic. We studied students’ views on concepts like
1) pressure, heat, temperature,
2) heat transfer mechanisms and elementary kinetic theory of gas. 

In order to have a picture of students’ overall understanding about the subject, we stepped into our next study. We asked students to express their ideas regarding the thermodynamics concepts. We chose about 70 concepts that they are expected to be familiarized with. The outcome of the study was quite surprising. Many concepts were alien to some students. Some concepts were understood separately but the linkages between them were not well understood.

A few demonstrations were also developed to increase the awareness as well as understanding of students regarding some concepts like adiabatic compression/expansion, heat engine, thermal equilibrium, zeroth law of thermodynamics etc. You can find the discussion on demonstration on thermal equilibrium in the following paper:

3) Understanding thermal equilibrium

We plan to proceed in the similar direction to understand the conceptual structure of students in the domain of basic thermodynamics concepts. This page will update you with new additional studies that we will undertake in future. So keep visiting this page…