Students’ learning outcomes in physics are significantly affected by the quality of outside-of-classroom learning experiences. A rich source of these experiences may be the physics homework. In this study, the effects of technologically-rich physics homework were evaluated. To that end a pretest-posttest experimental design has been used. 67 first-year students from the First Bosniak Gymnasium were randomly assigned to one of the three homework approaches. In the control group students received conventional homework about work and energy. Within the simulation-based approach students were expected to interact with simulations to investigate work and energy phenomena, whereas in the video-based approach students learned by analyzing a video in which the teacher interacted with the same simulations as mentioned above. Based on analysis of covariance we could find that the between-group differences on the conceptual posttest were not statistically significant, F(2, 47)=0.59, p=0.56. At the same time, students who learned by interacting with simulations expressed significantly more positive attitudes towards homework, compared to students from the video-based group (mean difference=1.88, p=0.038), as well as compared to students from the conventional group (mean difference=2.02, p=0.03). Simulation-based physics homework may be a powerful tool for helping the students to reach important affective learning outcomes.

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The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of the conventional high school instruction about conservation of mechanical energy in Canton Sarajevo. To that end we tested 441 high school students from six different schools in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) for their competence to apply the law of conservation of mechanical energy. Concretely, students were expected to solve 5 open-ended tasks that covered conceptually different situations. In each task we asked a set of sub-questions to check whether the students possess all the prerequisite sub-competencies for systematic reasoning about conservation of mechanical energy. In addition, we investigated how students’ ideas about conservation of mechanical energy were affected by the choice of the physical system, as well as by the choice of the observed time interval. Data analysis was performed on the level of individual tasks. The students’ written answers were analyzed and the frequencies of most prominent student responses were reported. Generally, it has been shown that most high school students from Sarajevo fail to identify and distinguish internal, external, conservative and non-conservative forces. Also, many students think that applicability of the conservation law does not depend on the chosen physical system and its evolution over time. We could conclude that high school students’ use of the conservation law is mostly based on remembering similar problem solving experiences, rather than on relevant strategic knowledge.

Physics curricula around the world recognise energy as one of the core concepts in science (Duit, 2014), as it is fundamental in development of integrated scientific understanding of phenomena (Linn et al., 2006; National Research Council, 2012; Nordine et al., 2011). Importance of the energy concept is also recognised by PISA and TIMSS studies and is reflected in many science standards (National Research Council, 2012; Next Generation Science Standards, 2013). However, research about students’ energy conceptions keeps showing that students at all educational levels have significant difficulties with the concept of energy (Goldring & Osborne, 1994; Lawson & McDermott, 1987; Neumann et al., 2013; Pride et al., 1998). Concretely, students exhibit difficulties with understanding work-energy processes (Van Huis & Van den Berg, 1993), energy degradation and energy conservation (Goldring & Osborne, 1994; Liu & McKeough, 2005; Neumann et al., 2013). Thereby, a large number of studies detected conservation of energy as the most difficult aspect of the energy concept (Lindsey et al., 2012; Neumann et al., 2013; Van Heuvelen & Zou, 2001; Van Huis & Van den Berg, 1993). In fact, only a very few students develop deeper understanding of energy conservation until the time they finish secondary school (Herrmann-Abell & DeBoer, 2018). For purposes of improving the quality of teaching about energy, it is useful to identify possible sources of above-mentioned students’ difficulties. Firstly, it is important to note that many students’ difficulties with the energy concept may be related to students’ (mis)understanding of systems (Seeley et al., 2019; Van Heuvelen & Zou, 2001; Van Huis & Van den Berg, 1993). Consequently, students should be helped to recognize the importance of carefully choosing the physical system, if one wants them to gain a functional understanding of energy conservation (Lindsey et al., 2012; Seeley et al., 2019). Such system-based Abstract. Conventional teaching about the law of conservation of mechanical energy (LCME) often results with students trying to solve problems by remembering similar problems they already covered in classes. Consequently, many students fail to transfer their knowledge to simplest real-life problems. Therefore, a pre-test – post-test quasi-experiment was conducted to evaluate the effects of an alternative, system-based approach to teaching about LCME. The study included 70 upper-secondary students from the First Bosniak Gymnasium Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Firstly, all students learned about energy in a conventional way. Then they wrote a test on LCME and had three additional hours of teaching about this topic, where one group of students learned in line with the forces-variant of the system approach (e.g., discussing conservative and nonconservative forces) and the other group with the process-variant of the same approach (e.g., discussing system’s states and processes like in thermodynamics). For both variants, only three hours of system-based teaching proved to substantially improve the students’ level of LCME understanding compared to the level of understanding they had after conventional teaching. It follows that the system approach may work well at the upper-secondary level, if it is introduced through the scaffolding-andfading technique.