Physics Education
The science content classes for elementary education majors at Winona State University used Learning Assistants for the first time during the 2009 - 2010 academic year. Pre-post information was gathered about the Learning Assistants and the…
Croatia does not score well in the human development index, rate of employment, or development of the high tech sector - to mention only a few indicators that hinder good prospects for improvement. Also, Croatian high school students are at…
Two methods of data analysis are compared: spreadsheet software and a statistics software suite. Their use is compared analyzing data collected in three selected experiments taken from an introductory physics laboratory, which include a…
A simple experiment is described for the direct determination of the wavelength dependence of the Rayleigh scattering cross section using the classical example of the blue sky.
We address four main areas in which graduate quantum mechanics education can be improved: course content, textbook, teaching methods, and assessment tools. We report on a three year longitudinal study at the Colorado School of Mines using…
We analyze a data set comprised of academic records of undergraduates at the University of Oregon from 2000-2004. We find correlations of roughly 0.35 to 0.5 between SAT scores and upper division, in-major GPA (henceforth, GPA).…
Research has linked a student's affect to her epistemology (Boaler & Greeno, 2000), but those constructs often apply broadly to a discipline and/or classroom culture. Independently, an emerging line of research shows that a student in a…
A simple approximation formula is derived here for the dependence of the period of a simple pendulum on amplitude that only requires a pocket calculator and furnishes an error of less than 0.25% with respect to the exact period. It is shown…
A method is described to empower students to efficiently perform general and literature searches using online resources. The method was tested on undergraduate and graduate students with varying backgrounds with scientific literature.…
There are ongoing divisions in the learning sciences between perspectives that treat cognition as occurring within individual minds and those that treat it as irreducibly distributed or situated in material and social contexts. We contend…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning can hinder them…
Quantum physics is considered as one of the most remarkable discoveries of contemporary physics grown during previous century and gradually manifested to the scientific world such as inventions of laser, the transistor, the electron…
In this work we discuss how to correctly obtain the number of degrees of freedom of a system constituted by n particles with fixed relative distances and which are immerse in a three-dimensional space. As a result of our analysis, we…
An instructional laboratory experiment to measure the muon mass is described. Using coincidence-anticoincidence detection, the decay of a cosmic-ray muon into an electron (or positron) is observed in a multiplate spark chamber, and recorded…
Physics makes powerful use of mathematics, yet the way this use is made is often poorly understood. Professionals closely integrate their mathematical symbology with physical meaning, resulting in a powerful and productive structure. But…
Wherever old Universities exist [in Europe, for example: Italy being not the last one], there can be found Scientific Instruments of Historical Interest, e.g., for Physics -which is the case we are concerned with here;- even if proper…
Several Authors have demonstrated that substituting computer simulations for real experiments conducted in a lab may help to improve students' understanding of the material. In the present work we try to understand the reasons for this…
We have investigated the long-term effect of student-centered instruction at the freshman level on juniors' performance on a conceptual survey of Electricity and Magnetism (E&M). We measured student performance on a research-based…
R is a language and computing environment that has been developed for data manipulation, statistical computing, and scientific graphing. In the paper, we demonstrate its use analyzing data collected in a few experiments taken from an…
We explain simple laboratory experiments for making quantitative measurements of the Doppler effect from sources with acceleration. We analyze the spectra and clarify the conditions for the Doppler effect to be experimentally measurable,…