ABSTRACT
It is so easy for students to confuse heat and temperature. After all, as the temperature of an object increases, so does the amount of energy it contains. Unfortunately, many students mistakenly believe that one object possesses more heat, or more energy, than another simply because its temperature is higher. A bowl of boiling chicken soup is hotter than a large pot of warm soup; however, the pot could melt more ice than the bowl. Many students, even students exposed to demonstrations of the chicken soup sort, do not generalize from their experience and form principles of thermodynamics. Many students do not understand relatively abstract principles such as the following: Different substances that have the same mass, are at the same initial temperature, and cool down by the same number of degrees, release different amounts of heat. For example, at the same temperature, 1 kg of boiling water can melt more than 30 times more ice than 1 kg of gold.
