Physics Education
Even if students can make the blend, interpret physics correctly in mathematical symbology and graphs, they still need to be able to apply that knowledge in productive and coherent ways. As instructors, we can show our solutions to complex…
Massive pre-trained language models have garnered attention and controversy due to their ability to generate human-like responses: attention due to their frequent indistinguishability from human-generated phraseology and narratives, and…
Following the emergence of COVID-19 in Spring 2020, undergraduate in-person physics laboratory courses at a R1 public university were adapted for remote learning to accommodate the subsequent campus closure. Video lectures and web-based…
Rubric-based admissions are claimed to help make the graduate admissions process more equitable, possibly helping to address the historical and ongoing inequities in the U.S. physics graduate school admissions process that have often…
Quantum Computing is an exciting field that draws from information theory, computer science, mathematics, and quantum physics to process information in fundamentally new ways. There is an ongoing race to develop practical quantum computers…
Smartphones and tablets are an integral part of our daily lives, and their capabilities extend well beyond communication and entertainment. With a broad choice of built-in sensors, using these mobile devices as experimental tools (MDETs)…
Textbooks play a fundamental role in teaching and learning in school science classrooms. In this paper we investigate the presentation of the nature of the electromagnetic field in a dozen of the world's most popular introductory university…
This project uses the R\"uchardt experiment to determine the ratio of specific heats and hence the number of degrees of freedom $f$ of different gases by measuring the frequency of damped simple harmonic motion where the gas provides the…
Popular media is an unspoken yet ever-present element of the physics landscape and a tool we can utilize in our teaching. It is also well-understood that students enter the physics classroom with a host of conceptions learned from the world…
Teaching quantum communication is a challenging task when involving different technical and engineering backgrounds. The use of an approach that exploits the knowledge of these profiles, as well as other technological resources available…
Most, if not all, physics undergraduate degree programs include instructional lab experiences. Physics lab instructors, both faculty and staff, are instrumental to student learning in instructional physics labs. However, the faculty-staff…
We demonstrate a simple and cost-efficient scanning confocal microscope setup for use in advanced instructional physics laboratories. The setup is constructed from readily available commercial products, and the implementation of a…
Undergraduate quantum mechanics focuses on teaching through a wavefunction approach in the position-space representation. This leads to a differential equation perspective for teaching the material. However, we know that abstract…
Problem Roulette (PR), an online study service at the University of Michigan, offers points-free formative practice to students preparing for examinations in introductory STEM courses. Using four years of PR data involving millions of…
We designed and developed a set of free-response questions to assess learning assistants pedagogical content knowledge in the context of questioning (PCK-Q). Our goal was to develop a set of written free-response questions that would be…
"So what do you do? I mean, what do you actually do?" This is one of the most common questions one theoretical physicist receives from her students, and is representative of a common curiosity among aspiring physicists. Students often…
Discipline-based education researchers produce knowledge that aims to help instructors improve student learning and educational outcomes. Yet, the information produced may not even reach the educators it is intended to influence. Prior work…
Significant attention in the PER community has been paid to student cognition and reasoning processes in undergraduate quantum mechanics. Until recently, however, these same topics have remained largely unexplored in the context of emerging…
Changing basis is a common task when solving quantum mechanical problems. As part of a research project investigating student understanding of basis and change of basis in quantum mechanics, we developed a tutorial to support students in…
Through the Fiat Lux seminar series at the University of California, Los Angeles, Volume 1 presents the first pedagogical and academic plans to destabilize hegemonic logics and hierarchies in STEM studies and knowledge production.