Physics Education
Open Source Physics (Brown, 2012; Christian, 2010; Esquembre, 2012; Hwang, 2010) empowers teachers and students to create and use these free tools with the associated intellectual property rights given to customise (Wee & Mak, 2009) the…
There is general agreement that creativity and innovation are desirable traits in the toolbox of 21\textsuperscript{st} century engineers, as well as in the future workforce in general. However, there is a dearth of exemplars, pedagogical…
The primary aim, in teaching physics, is that the student should gain an understanding of the principles of physics and how to apply them to different problems. A secondary aim is to allow the students to appreciate the scientific approach…
Students' curiosity often seems nearly nonexistent in a lecture setting; we discuss a variety of possible reasons for this, but it is the instructor who typically poses questions while only a few students, usually the better ones, respond.…
In this paper we attempt to present some questions with respect to the approach used in some brazilian mid-level textbooks on the topic of stationary sound waves in tubes. In addition to ranking the textbooks within a set of criteria, we…
The physics instruction at UC Davis for life science majors takes place in a long-standing reformed large-enrollment physics course in which the discussion/lab instructors (primarily graduate student teaching assistants) implement the…
Learning of advanced physics, requires a combination of empirical, conceptual and theoretical understanding. Students use a combination of these approaches to learn new material. Each student has different prior knowledge and will master…
The physical interpretation for the Davisson-Germer experiments on nickel (Ni) single crystals [(111), (100), and (110) surfaces] is presented in terms of two-dimensional (2D) Bragg scattering. The Ni surface acts as a reflective…
The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) was developed as a broadly applicable assessment tool for undergraduate physics lab courses. At the beginning and end of the semester, the E-CLASS…
Recently, the National Research Council's framework for next generation science standards highlighted "computational thinking" as one of its "fundamental practices". 9th Grade students taking a physics course that employed the Modeling…
Many prominent lines of research on student's reasoning and conceptual change within learning sciences and physics education research have not attended to the role of learners' affect or emotions in the dynamics of their conceptual…
Learning physics is a context dependent process. I consider a broader interdisciplinary problem of where differences in understanding and reasoning arise. I suggest the long run effects a multiple choice based learning system as well as…
Common Objects like a comb or a pen get charged when rubbed against something like human hair or garment clothing. Charged objects exhibit noticeable attractive or repulsive force lifting small pieces of paper or pushing/pulling a suspended…
I describe an activity created to help our students learn how to write a scientific paper by reverse engineering a contrastive set of existing papers. I look at three recent implementations of this activity and use a multiple cognitive…
Reliable and validated assessments of introductory physics have been instrumental in driving curricular and pedagogical reforms that lead to improved student learning. As part of an effort to systematically improve our sophomore-level…
A common feature of the recent calls for reform of the undergraduate biology curriculum has been for better coordination between biology and the courses from the allied disciplines of mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Physics has lagged…
This user guide outlines the use of TIM, an interactive ray-tracing program with a number of special powers. TIM can be customised and embedded into internet pages, making it suitable not only for research but also for its dissemination.
The spring-mass system studied in undergraduate physics laboratories may show complex dynamics due to the simultaneous action of gravitational, elastic, and torsional forces, in addition to air friction. In this paper, we describe a…
This paper describes our large reformed introductory physics course at UC Davis, which bioscience students have been taking since 1996. The central feature of this course is a focus on sense-making by the students during the five hours per…
The objective of this project is to compare the effectiveness of teaching styles used in high school physics classes and the methods used to assess them. We would like to determine those approaches to physics at the high schools that work…