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As quantum information science and technology (QIST) is becoming more prevalent and occurring not only in research labs but also in industry, many educators are considering how best to incorporate learning about quantum mechanics into…
Textbooks in applied mathematics often use graphs to explain the meaning of formulae, even though their benefit is still not fully explored. To test processes underlying this assumed multimedia effect we collected performance scores, eye…
This article outlines a comprehensive redesign of an introductory physics laboratory course aimed at promoting active student engagement, enhancing scientific experimental skills and the development of expert-like attitudes. The redesign…
Modeling Instruction (MI), an active-learning introductory physics curriculum, has been shown to improve student academic success. Peer-to-peer interactions play a salient role in the MI classroom. Their impact on student interest and…
The evolution of science education is a dynamic process driven by advances in pedagogy, technology, and especially, our understanding of how students learn. Educators are exploring innovative teaching and learning methodologies such as…
Teaching scientific concepts is essential but challenging, and analogies help students connect new concepts to familiar ideas. Advancements in large language models (LLMs) enable generating analogies, yet their effectiveness in education…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
Case-oriented physics education research - which seeks to refine and develop theory by linking that theory to cases - incorporates distinct practices for selecting data for analysis, generalizing results, and making causal claims.…
We describe a course designed to help future educators build an integrated understanding of the different elements of physics education research (PER), including: research into student learning, content knowledge from the perspective of how…
We describe the development of a junior-senior level course for Physics majors designed to teach Mathematica skills in support of their undergraduate coursework, but also to introduce students to modern research level results. Standard…
Recent years have seen a growing interest in modernizing physics and science curricula around the world. While many science educators and curriculum developers design instructional resources to successfully introduce topics of Einsteinian…
A central aim of physics education research is to understand the processes of learning and use that understanding to inform instruction. To this end, researchers often conduct studies to measure the effect of classroom interventions on…
There is a large variety of goals instructors have for laboratory courses, with different courses focusing on different subsets of goals. An often implicit, but crucial, goal is to develop students` attitudes, views, and expectations about…
We report results from a study designed to identify links between undergraduate students' views about experimental physics and their engagement in multiweek projects in lab courses. Using surveys and interviews, we explored whether students…
Development of conceptual multiple-choice tests related to a particular physics topic is important for designing research-based learning tools to reduce the difficulties. We explore the difficulties that the advanced undergraduate and…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
Laboratory courses for upper-division undergraduates often involve sophisticated equipment, relatively small class sizes, and extended hands-on projects. These courses present distinct challenges and opportunities for the physics education…
The Photonics Explorer program aims to equip science teachers at Europe's secondary schools free-of-charge with up-to-date educational material to really engage, excite and educate students about the fascination of working with light.
With the interactivity and multiple representation features, computer simulations lend itself to the guided inquiry learning. However, these simulations are usually designed for post-elementary students. Thus, the aim of this study is to…
Favorable outcomes from ongoing research at the University of Colorado Boulder on student learning in junior-level electrostatics (E&M I) have led us to extend this work to upper-division electrodynamics (E&M II). We describe here our…