Physics Education
The appearance of the coronavirus (COVID-19) in late 2019 has dominated the news in the last few months as it developed into a pandemic. In many mathematics and physics classrooms, instructors are using the time series of the number of…
Much work in physics education research (PER) characterizes faculty teaching practice in terms of whether faculty use specific named PER-based teaching methods, either with fidelity or with adaptation; we call this research paradigm the…
We present the findings of a pilot plan of active learning implemented in introductory physics in a Chilean public university. The model is research based as it considered a literature review for adequate selection and design of activities,…
Reform movements in science education, such as inquiry-based instruction, have been heavily influenced by constructivist learning theories (National Research Council, 2000). These learning theories place the learner as the sole constructor…
Instructional physics labs are critical junctures for many STEM majors to develop an understanding of experimentation in the sciences. Students can acquire useful experimental skills and grow their identities as scientists. However, many…
Prior research has shown that physics students often think about experimental procedures and data analysis very differently from experts. One key framework for analyzing student thinking has found that student thinking is more point-like,…
Athena (named after the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom) is a pre-university study programme for mathematics and physics organised by the Faculty of Science at the University of Geneva. It targets pupils enrolled in the final or penultimate…
The ability to use concepts learned in one context to solve problems in a different context (i.e., transfer of learning) is a hallmark of expertise in physics. The majority of the studies on transfer of learning in physics have focused on…
Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments…
The concepts of the Coriolis and the centrifugal force are essential in various scientific fields and they are standard components of introductory physics lectures. In this paper we explore how students understand and apply concepts of…
An introductory Astronomy survey course is often taken to satisfy a college graduation requirement for non-science majors at colleges around the United States. In this course, material that can be broadly categorized into topics related to…
We have used an unsupervised machine learning method called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to thematically analyze all papers published in the Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings between 2001 and 2018. By looking at…
Many prior studies have found a gender gap between male and female students' performance on conceptual assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) with male students…
On their way to an academic career in physics, Ph.D. students have to overcome difficulties at many levels. Beyond the intellectual challenge, there are also psychological, social and economic barriers. We studied the difficulties…
Undergraduate research has become an essential mode of engaging and retaining students in physics. At Loyola University Chicago, first-year physics students have been participating in the Freshman Projects program for over twenty years,…
We report results from a survey of lab instructors on how they adapted their courses in the transition to emergency remote teaching due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this report is to share the experiences of instructors in order…
We discuss research involving the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) to evaluate one aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of teaching assistants (TAs): the knowledge of introductory students' alternate conceptions…
Barriers to women's education and employment in Europe and the U.S. in the nineteenth century made it unlikely that any women would be among the few physicists whose ideas are taught in high school and college courses. This paper explores…
An appropriate diagram is a required element of a solution building process in physics problem solving and it can transform a given problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving the problem. A major focus while helping…
Several prior studies in introductory physics have found a gender gap on conceptual assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) with male students performing better…