Do secondary education students have a suitable understanding of the concepts of work and heat as well as their connection with energy?

The purpose of this project is to go deeply into the knowledge which secondary education students have about the concepts of work and heat. Different activities have been proposed to 170 students taking their last course of post-compulsory secondary education (aged 17/18). Moreover, other five students have been interviewed. The different tasks are devoted essentially to find out in what extent these students understand the qualitative ideas of work and heat, as well as to find out whether they are able to relate such concepts to the variations of energy experienced by the systems. The proposals and reasoning used by the students lead us to state that they have grasped poor learning of such concepts when they finish their studies.