The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of conceptual change text to improve grade eight pupils‘ understanding of energy concepts. A design based research as an intervention study with pre-posttest design and two groups were conducted. Pupils‘ conceptual knowledge was assessed before and after an intervention. The design thus allows gauging differential change of conceptual knowledge between conditions. For this study, the sampling technique for choosing the schools was purposive sampling. But after the school was chosen, the researcher had randomly chosen one classroom from six classrooms; but, the experimental and control group were assigned before their pretest was analyzed. This has resulted in 72 pupils that had participated in all phases of the study. The participants were divided into two groups of 36 students for experiment class studied energy concepts with conceptual change text and the 36 students of control group studied with traditional text instruction. To evaluate Students' understanding of energy concepts, energy conceptual test of six open-ended questions was administered to both groups of students before and after the treatment. As a result, it is showed that; (1) there was an improvement in students‘ understanding between the students who learned with conceptual change text instruction and those who learned with traditional text instruction, (2) there was a significant difference in students‘ misconception reduction in the topic of energy between the students who learned with conceptual change text instruction and the students who learned with traditional text instruction. Conceptual change text instruction increases the students‘ misconception reduction better than traditional text instruction by controlling students‘ prior knowledge. The finding indicates that conceptual change text was an effective tool to improve students‘ understanding of energy concepts. The study recommended that the students should be firstly taught the concepts, then the laws and the theories and the conceptual change texts instruction accompanied with pictures/analogies can be used during the instruction of other integrated science concepts to generalize the study.