Physics Education
The effect of class size on student learning has numerous policy implications and has been a major subject of conversation and research for decades. Despite this, few studies have been done on class size in the context of university…
The lack of an engaging pedagogy and the highly competitive atmosphere in introductory science courses tend to discourage students from pursuing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Once in a STEM field, academic…
Instructional labs are widely seen as a unique, albeit expensive, way to teach scientific content. We measured the effectiveness of introductory lab courses at achieving this educational goal across nine different lab courses at three very…
Developing critical thinking skills is a common goal of an undergraduate physics curriculum. How do students make sense of evidence and what do they do with it? In this study, we evaluated students' critical thinking behaviors through their…
Special Relativity is taught to physics sophomores at Johns Hopkins University in a series of eight lectures. Lecture 1 covers the principle of relativity and the derivation of the Lorentz transform. Lecture 2 covers length contraction and…
We have analyzed the impact of taking an associated lab course on the scores on final exam questions in two large introductory physics courses. Approximately a third of the students who completed each course also took an accompanying…
We describe a variant of the popular game "Pictionary" based on terms used in elementary and high school physics. We believe that drawing of physical terms helps students develop a deeper understanding of physical concepts behind them, as…
Despite the significant amount of time undergraduate students spend in introductory physics labs, there is little consensus on instructional goals and accepted diagnostic assessments for these labs. In response to these issues, we have…
It has been reported that students often leave the introductory physics classroom believing that physics is less connected to the real world than when they entered. In this paper we aim to complicate that narrative by considering students'…
A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in…
In this paper we describe an activity for engaging students in crafting definitions. We explore the strengths of this particular activity as well as the broader implications of engaging students in crafting definitions more generally.
Friction is a complex phenomenon that is of paramount importance in everyday life. We present an easy-to-build and inexpensive experiment illustrating Coulomb's law of kinetic friction. The so-called friction, or Timoshenko, oscillator…
To effectively prepare engineering students requires of formation of a system of fundamental physical knowledge together with the ability to apply them in specific productive activities, both on fundamental and on the profiled-oriented…
This study discusses factors that keep women from entering science and technology, which include social stereotypes that they struggle against, lack of maternity leave and other basic human rights, and the climate that makes them leave…
A.V. Usova (1921-2014) has always been one of the leading figures in Russian physics education. Her theory of physics concept formation was formulated during the 1970s and the 1980s and directly influenced the process of physics education…
In the article discusses the possibility of using of QR-codes in teaching physics. It is noted that the technology of recognition of QR-codes can be attributed to elements of mobile information and education environment. On the basis of…
This study proposes a framework for matchmaking a mentor and mentee by exploring intentions of entrepreneurs towards mentoring. The framework based on Theory of Planned Behaviour, Institutional Theory and Social Exchange Theory were applied…
We present an experiment conductive to an understanding of both Faraday's law and the properties of the superconducting state. It consists in the analysis of the motion of a superconducting loop moving under the influence of gravity in an…
In bosonic string theory, the solutions to the string equations of motion may be expressed as two-dimensional manifolds in a relativistic spacetime. We develop MATLAB software for the generation of open and closed string solutions and for…
Borrowing methods and formulas from Prof. Goodman's classic Introduction to Fourier Optics textbook [1], I have developed a software package [2] that has been used in both industrial research and classroom teaching [3]. This paper briefly…