Physics Education
General relativity predicts that clocks run more slowly near massive objects. The effect is small---a clock at sea level lags behind one 1000 m above sea level by only 9.4 ns/day. Here, we demonstrate that a measurement of this effect can…
A primary goal of many undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in the physical sciences is to prepare students to engage in scientific research, or to prepare students for careers that leverage skillsets similar to those used by research…
The Einstein-First project aims to change the paradigm of school science teaching through the introduction of modern Einsteinian concepts of space and time, gravity and quanta at an early age. These concepts are rarely taught to school…
Homework in introductory physics represents an important part of a student's learning experience; therefore choosing the manner in which homework is presented merits investigation. We performed three rounds of clinical trials comparing the…
The resonance phenomenon is widely known from Physics courses. Qualitatively speaking, it takes place in a driven oscillating system whenever the driven frequency approaches the natural frequency. It is when the amplitude of the…
Students from statistically underrepresented minority (URM) groups and women earn a smaller fraction of undergraduate and graduate degrees in most physical sciences, particularly physics. This underrepresentation is also prevalent at the…
International Masterclasses are events for high school students that enable them to act as "particle physicists for day" by analyzing authentic data from particle physics experiments under the tutelage of scientists. International…
The work describes an analogy-based small oscillations analysis of a standard static equilibrium lab problem. In addition to force analysis, a potential energy function for the system is developed, and by drawing out mathematical…
Modeling the creative mathematical sensemaking that characterizes expert thinking in physics is typically a struggle for new learners. To help students learn to reason this way, we created a set of supplemental activities called Physics…
The Colorado Upper-Division Electrostatics (CUE) Diagnostic is an exam developed as part of the curriculum reform at the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU). It was designed to assess conceptual learning within upper-division electricity…
Computation is a central aspect of modern science and engineering work, and yet, computational instruction has yet to fully pervade university STEM curricula. In physics, we have begun to integrate computation into our courses in a variety…
We discuss the clusters of resources that emerge when upper-division students write about electromagnetic fields in linear materials. The data analyzed for this paper comes from students' written tests in an upper-division electricity and…
Recent and influential critiques of standardized testing have noted the existence of non-trivial numbers of successful scientists who received low scores on the GRE. Here we use computer simulations to show that the prevalence of such…
In Norway, particle physics is part of the high school curriculum in physics which introduces the need for good university teaching in particle physics without the usual technical approach. Given how much conflicting information and…
In the field of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies have made huge progress during the last years and also reached the field of education. The virtuality continuum, ranging from pure virtuality on one side to the…
This lesson unit has been developed within the framework the EU Space Awareness project. It provides an insight into the history and navigational methods of the Bronze Age Mediterranean peoples. The students explore the link between…
This activity has been developed as a resource for the "EU Space Awareness" educational programme. As part of the suite "Our Fragile Planet" together with the "Climate Box" it addresses aspects of weather phenomena, the Earth's climate and…
This activity has been developed as a resource for the "EU Space Awareness" educational programme. As part of the suite "Our Fragile Planet" together with the "Climate Box" it addresses aspects of weather phenomena, the Earth's climate and…
This activity has been developed as a resource for the "EU Space Awareness" educational programme. As part of the suite "Our Fragile Planet" together with the "Climate Box" it addresses aspects of weather phenomena, the Earth's climate and…
The lecture "Atomistic Materials Modeling" is a core qualification of the master program "materials science" at the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH). Within the lecture, various modern methods for atomistic materials modeling are…