Le proprietà termiche dei materiali. II – Schemi di conoscenza di studenti ed insegnanti

Schemes of common sense knowledge of Italian students and teachers were inferred from the answers to a paper-and-pencil test concerning real-life situations involving thermal phenomena. Concept maps drawn from the test show that the schemes are richer and less detached from the scientific framework than generally supposed. Concepts of heat and temperature are well separated and it is recognized that they cannot fully explain every-day phenomena. The results show that the word “heat” is often introduced as an intermediate step, when explaining the temperature increase due to mechanical actions, and this suggests an intuition of either internal energy or entropy.