Physics Education
We have been investigating advanced students' learning of quantum mechanics concepts and have developed interactive tutorials which strive to help students learn these concepts. Two such tutorials, focused on the Mach-Zehnder interferometer…
Prior research suggest that introductory physics students have difficulty with graphing and interpreting graphs. Here, we discuss an investigation of student difficulties in translating between mathematical and graphical representations for…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by educators and physics education researchers. Many of the items on the FCI have strong distractor choices…
This study examines whether including more contextual information in data analysis could improve our ability to identify the relation between students' online learning behavior and overall performance in an introductory physics course. We…
The cyclic format of the undergraduate physics curriculum depends on students' ability to recall and utilize material covered in prior courses in order to reliably build on that knowledge in later courses. However, there is evidence to…
We report the results of a survey applied to students and professionals in the area of physics in Brazil, pursuing to draw a portrait of the composition of this community in terms of the social markers age, race, ethnicity, geographical…
For several decades, scholars have studied cooperation and its outcomes in the educational context. Yet, we lack a complete understanding of how different instructional strategies impact the relationship between cooperation and learning.…
Current trends suggest that significant gender disparities exist within Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education at university, with female students being underrepresented in physics, but more equally represented…
We detail an experimental programme we have been testing in our university. Our Advanced Hackspace, attempts to give all members of the university, from students to technicians, free access to the means to develop their own…
The ability to flexibly transform between different representations (e.g., from mathematical to graphical representations) of the same concept is a hallmark of expertise. Prior research suggests that many introductory physics students show…
Learning quantum mechanics is challenging, even for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Research-validated interactive tutorials that build on students' prior knowledge can be useful tools to enhance student learning. We have…
Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know the common alternate conceptions of introductory physics students and explicitly take into account common student difficulties in their instructional design. Here, we…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. One major focus while helping introductory physics students learn effective…
This is the problem of the 7-th international Experimental Physics Olympiad "The Day of the Inductance". A large inductance made by a general impedance converter is measured by the Maxwell-Wien bridge. The youngest students (S category)…
Several consecutive experiments with specifically built set-up are described. Performing of the consecutive experimental tasks enables possibility to determine Boltzmann's constant $k_\mathrm{_B}$. The fluctuations of the voltage $U(t)$ of…
Several consecutive experiments are described with a printed circuit board PCB set-up, especially designed for these experiments. Doing the consecutive experimental tasks opens up possibility to determine the value of electron charge $q_e.$…
This problem was given at the Fourth Open and International Experimental Physics Olympiad (EPO4) Day of Light on 23 April 2016 in Sofia organized by the Sofia Branch of the Union of Physicists in Bulgaria and the Society of Physicists of…
This problem was given at Third Experimental Physics Olympiad "The day of the resistor", 31 October 2015, Kumanovo, organized by the Regional Society of Physicists of Strumica, Macedonia and the Sofia Branch of the Union of Physicists in…
This problem was given on the Open Experimental Physics Olympiad (OEPO) "The day of the photon" on 25 April 2015. The Olympiad was a part of the celebration of the International Year of Light (IYL)…
In this paper, we present a new method to determine the numerical value of the Boltzmann constant k and its uncertainty. We have used Nitrogen gas in different pressure values in the range 56 kPa - 100 kPa, for three different volumes.In…