Student understanding of emergent aspects of radioactivity
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https://doi.org/10.12973/ijpce/20529Keywords:
emergence, half-life, radioactivity, student understandingAbstract
In this paper, we report on a pilot interview and subsequent survey study investigating student understanding of radioactivity, particularly half-life. Our findings are consistent with other studies in physics education research, for example, that some students think that an individual atom decays over a prolonged period of time, with half of it being gone at the half-life. We see this naïve idea as a failure to recognize the emergent nature of the decay (that is, a large collection of atoms has different properties than an individual atom does). Research of naïve ideas in radioactivity generally treats the ideas as being stable misconceptions. In this paper, however, we present evidence that student reasoning can fluidly shift when thinking about radioactivity, depending on the context.
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