This Resource Letter draws on discipline-based education research from physics, chemistry, and biology to collect literature on the teaching of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics in the three disciplines. While the overlap among the disciplinar
y literatures is limited at present, we hope this Resource Letter will spark more interdisciplinary interaction.
Teaching about energy in interdisciplinary settings that emphasize coherence among physics, chemistry, and biology leads to a more central role for chemical bond energy. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to chemical energy leads to modeling
chemical bonds in terms of negative energy. While recent work on ontological metaphors for energy has emphasized the affordances of the substance ontology, this ontology is problematic in the context of negative energy. Instead, we apply a dynamic ontologies perspective to argue that blending the substance and location ontologies for energy can be effective in reasoning about negative energy in the context of reasoning about chemical bonds. We present data from an introductory physics for the life sciences (IPLS) course in which both experts and students successfully use this blended ontology. Blending these ontologies is most successful when the substance and location ontologies are combined such that each is strategically utilized in reasoning about particular aspects of energetic processes.
In an Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) course that leverages authentic biological examples, student ideas about entropy as disorder or chaos come into contact with their ideas about the spontaneous formation of organized biological struct
ure. It is possible to reconcile the natural tendency to disorder with the organized clustering of macromolecules, but doing so in a way that will be meaningful to students requires that we take seriously the ideas about entropy and spontaneity that students bring to IPLS courses from their prior experiences in biology and chemistry. We draw on case study interviews to argue that an approach that emphasizes the interplay of energy and entropy in determining spontaneity (one that involves a central role for free energy) is one that draws on students resources from biology and chemistry in particularly effective ways. We see the positioning of entropic arguments alongside energetic arguments in the determination of spontaneity as an important step toward making our life science students biology, chemistry, and physics experiences more coherent.
Energy is a complex idea that cuts across scientific disciplines. For life science students, an approach to energy that incorporates chemical bonds and chemical reactions is better equipped to meet the needs of life sciences students than a tradition
al introductory physics approach that focuses primarily on mechanical energy. We present a curricular sequence, or thread, designed to build up students understanding of chemical energy in an introductory physics course for the life sciences. This thread is designed to connect ideas about energy from physics, biology, and chemistry. We describe the kinds of connections among energetic concepts that we intended to develop to build interdisciplinary coherence, and present some examples of curriculum materials and student data that illustrate our approach.
Much recent work in physics education research has focused on ontological metaphors for energy, particularly the substance ontology and its pedagogical affordances. The concept of negative energy problematizes the substance ontology for energy, but i
n many instructional settings, the specific difficulties around negative energy are outweighed by the general advantages of the substance ontology. However, we claim that our interdisciplinary setting (a physics class that builds deep connections to biology and chemistry) leads to a different set of considerations and conclusions. In a course designed to draw interdisciplinary connections, the centrality of chemical bond energy in biology necessitates foregrounding negative energy from the beginning. We argue that the emphasis on negative energy requires a combination of substance and location ontologies. The location ontology enables energies both above and below zero. We present preliminary student data that illustrate difficulties in reasoning about negative energy, and the affordances of the location metaphor.
