Physics Education
General Relativity (GR) represents the most recent theory of gravity, on which all modern astrophysics is based, including some of the most astonishing results of physics research. Nevertheless, its study is limited to university courses,…
Theories developed by Tinto and Nora identify academic performance, learning gains, and involvement in learning communities as significant facets of student engagement that, in turn, support student persistence. Collaborative learning…
This article reports on an investigation of student understanding of the concept of time in special relativity. A series of research tasks are discussed that illustrate, step-by-step, how student reasoning of fundamental concepts of…
Among the many decisions to be made in their teaching practice, physics teachers must decide how to explain each particular phenomenon to students. This study explores student teachers' (STs) decision-making process when presented with…
The ability to control the frequency of an external-cavity diode laser (ECDL) is an essential component for undergraduate laboratories and atomic physics research. Typically the housing for the ECDL's diffraction grating and piezoelectric…
The bra and ket notation introduced by Dirac and the dimensional analysis are two powerful tools for the physicist. Curiously, almost nothing is said about connections between these two topics in the literature. We show here that bras and…
At many physics departments a significant fraction of teaching is in support of engineers and scientists in other majors. These service courses are thus an automatic crucible of interdisciplinary interaction, and at times, strife. For…
We investigate the impact of content sequencing on student learning outcomes in a first-year university electromagnetism course. Using a custom-built online system, the McGill Learning Platform (McLEAP), we test student problem-solving…
Teaching modern physics in high school is of increasingly importance as it can offer students a more realistic and updated vision of the world, and can provide an opportunity to understand the most recent scientific discoveries. In this…
In this paper, we present the Quantum Information Software Developer Kit - Qiskit, for teaching quantum computing to undergraduate students, with basic knowledge of quantum mechanics postulates. We focus on presenting the construction of…
Computerized tomography (CT) has been used for decades by medical professionals to detect and diagnose injuries and ailments. CT scanners are based on interesting physics, but due to their bulk, cost, and safety, hands on experience with a…
The time it takes a student to graduate with a university degree is mitigated by a variety of factors such as their background, the academic performance at university, and their integration into the social communities of the university they…
In recent times, spatial light modulators have become a common tool in optics laboratories as well as industrial environment to shape the spatial structure of a beam. Although these devices are often easy to use, they usually come at a high…
We present a framework for investigating effective dynamics of SU(3) color charge. Two- and three-body effective interaction terms inspired by the Heisenberg spin model are considered. In particular, a toy model for a three-source "baryon"…
This paper is aimed to develop formative actions about Science Technology and Society (STS) relations in the teaching of Physics in order to integrate Act 10.639/2003, which includes African, and Afro-Brazilian history and culture in school…
Our investigation of 353 faculty-produced multiple-choice Think-Pair-Share questions leads to key insights into faculty members' ideas about the discipline representations and intellectual tasks that could engage learners on key topics in…
Despite the negative stereotypes still overshadowing community colleges, scores of freshmen nationwide are deliberately beginning their college careers at these institutions, and the numbers are increasing more than twice as fast as those…
Engineering Thermodynamics has been the core course of many science and engineering majors around the world, including energy and power, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, aerospace, cryogenic refrigeration, food engineering,…
International MasterClasses (IMC), an outreach activity of the International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG), has been bringing cutting-edge particle physics research to schoolchildren for over 15 years now. All four LHC experiments…
This paper examines the impact of COVID-19 induced campus closure on university students' self-regulated learning behavior by analyzing click-stream data collected from student interactions with 70 online learning modules in a university…