A qualitative look on children’s words in explanation of processes

A didactic path, devoted to build the concept of energy for primary school pupils, has been experimented. Energy is proposed as the proportion between the products of the amounts of the involved extensive quantities multiplied by the changes of the corresponding potentials. This paper presents a qualitative investigation about the language initially used by pupils to describe and interpret the processes and its evolution during the development of the didactic path. The theoretical framework is the figurative and embodied thought. The adopted interpretative key for analysis is addressed to point out some recurring linguistic-cognitive categories, semantically related to the “force-power” of entities in an interaction. The work consists in the individuation of the presence/absence of these force-power elements, through an analysis of the pupils discourses. The analysis results converge into an interpretative framework, in form of the keywords the teacher may use to assess the learning progress of each student. The research question is: how it can be constructed an analysis grid of language using language categories crossed with a scale of energy concept growth, so that it can be used to show the pupils concept evolution?