[YAPA] Radioactive decay

[Robert Pendzick]

Seeing we touched on radioactive decay at the YAPA meeting tonight, thought these two papers by Edward Prather might be of interst.



He covers the misconceptions of students,



"Many students provided responses consistent with

the belief that radioactive objects disappear or

disintegrate during radioactive decay. These students

often predict that the mass, volume, and number of

atoms for radioactive objects decrease by half during a

half-life. For many students it appears that the word half

acts like a mental trigger that leads the student to divide

by two. These students appear to perform this division

without any further thought about the radioactive decay

process. These reasoning difficulties likely stem from

students' inability to properly reason about the

radioactive decay process at the atomic (or nuclear) level.

Unfortunately, even for those students who do have an

understanding of radioactivity that involves the atom,

they often also predict that half of the radioactive object

will disappear after a half-life."



Be careful how you model, since the ideas of the models stick with students a long time.

Robert Pendzick
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