Integrated Understanding and Future Learning

ABSTRACT: Energy is a fundamental unifying concept of science, yet common ap-proaches to energy instruction in middle school have shown little success with helping students develop their naı̈ve ideas about energy into more sophisticated understandings that are useful for making sense of their experiences. While traditional energy instruction often focuses on simple calculations of energy in idealized systems, we developed a new middle school energy unit that focuses qualitatively on the energy transformations that occur in ev-eryday, nonidealized, systems. In this article, we describe our approach to energy instructio