Destructive interference and conservation of energy: Characteristics of gifted students’ understanding

Although the wave model is one of the most important models in physics, many students have difficulty in understanding the model. Interference is one of the most important concepts for understanding the phenomena related to waves, but finding a textbook that directly explains conservation of energy and interference is difficult. In addition to that, students have difficulty in understanding conservation of energy and interference. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate students’ understanding of energy conservation for various destructive interference situations and to obtain educational implications. In this study, we examined gifted students’ responses on six problems related to destructive interference. The results showed that the students’ responses could be classified into four categories; ‘Energy conservation type’, ‘Non-energy conservation type’, ‘Non-experimental type’, and ‘Limited explanation type’ . In this study, students showed a positive response to the fact that they had a chance to think directly about destructive interference and conservation of energy in various situations.