The alternative conceptions that students hold put a brake on subsequent meaningful learning, and therefore, the identification of these wrong ideas is crucial for effective teaching and academic success. Undergraduate STEM students often perceive Chemical Thermodynamics as a difficult subject, in which entropy has been pointed out as a threshold concept. In this paper, the prevalence of two alternative conceptions about entropy of first-year undergraduate students is studied by analyzing quantitative and qualitative results before and after instruction. It was found that students hold alternative conceptions about the conservation of entropy, whose prevalence depends on the specific context of the question, and that they strongly relate entropy to visual disorder. To some extent, the approach of using instructional videos and qualitative questionnaires as a teaching method was successful in enhancing students’ understanding. The results of this research can be valuable for developing effective evidence-based curricula to improve teaching and help students deeply understand fundamental thermodynamic concepts.

中文翻译：

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本科生对熵阈值概念的思考

学生持有的另类观念会阻碍后续有意义的学习，因此，识别这些错误观念对于有效的教学和学业成功至关重要。本科 STEM 学生经常将化学热力学视为一门困难的学科，其中熵被指出是一个阈值概念。本文通过分析教学前后的定量和定性结果，研究了本科一年级学生关于熵的两种替代概念的流行情况。研究发现，学生对熵守恒持有不同的观念，其普遍程度取决于问题的具体背景，并且他们将熵与视觉障碍密切相关。在某种程度上，使用教学视频和定性问卷作为教学方法的方法成功地增强了学生的理解。这项研究的结果对于开发有效的循证课程以改善教学并帮助学生深入理解基本的热力学概念具有重要意义。