Relationship between learners' epistemological beliefs, learning behavior and conceptions of mechanical energy

Although it is difficult to understand the role that students' knowledge about the nature of science plays in their daily learning of science in school, the current study focuses on the important interplay between students' scientific epistemological beliefs, their learning behavior, and conceptions of mechanical energy. To explore this topic, the epistemological beliefs of six sophomores on the nature of physics knowledge in textbooks and their beliefs on the nature of the larger body of scientific knowledge were investigated through interviews. All participants were majoring in physics education and all thought that the larger body of scientific knowledge could be changed. Three categories were then introduced that classified how the students' understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge was linked with their learning behavior: 'receiving physics knowledge based on authority', 'receiving physics knowledge based on extrinsic motivation', and 'authentic understanding'. These categories were concerned with the acquisition of personal conceptions of mechanical energy. In particular, those students who pursued a superficial consistency and held a belief concerned with a definition of energy experienced a cognitive conflict with the conceptions of negative mechanical energy and a standard position. They received physics knowledge from textbooks based on authority.