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When considering performing an Introductory Physics for Life Sciences course transformation for one's own institution, life science majors' achievement goals are a necessary consideration to ensure the pedagogical transformation will be…
It has been reported that students often leave the introductory physics classroom believing that physics is less connected to the real world than when they entered. In this paper we aim to complicate that narrative by considering students'…
Undergraduate biochemistry laboratory courses often do not provide students with an authentic research experience, particularly when the express purpose of the laboratory is purely instructional. However, an instructional laboratory course…
Improving the physics enterprise to broaden participation in physics is one of the main goals of the physics education research community. Many classically trained physics faculty transition during their faculty career into engaging in…
Student learning in instructional physics labs represents a growing area of research that includes investigations of students' beliefs and expectations about the nature of experimental physics. To directly probe students' epistemologies…
Despite the large body of research showing that students in STEM classes at all levels learn better via active learning than they do via lecture, post-secondary physics and astronomy (P&A) faculty members continue to primarily use…
Flipped classroom pedagogy is widely used in undergraduate mathematics to promote active learning, yet it remains unclear whether students experience it in systematically different ways. In this study, we analyze student perceptions from an…
The objectives of physics laboratory courses include fostering conceptual understanding and development of several important cognitive, psycho-motor, attitudinal and affective abilities. In most of the Indian colleges and universities (and…
Since 2010, the Yale physics department has offered a novel calculus-based introductory physics for the life science (IPLS) sequence, that re-imagines the IPLS syllabus to include a selection of biologically and medically relevant topics,…
Computation is intertwined with essentially all aspects of physics research and is invaluable for physicists' careers. Despite its disciplinary importance, integration of computation into physics education remains a challenge and, moreover,…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
The Georgia Tech blended introductory calculus-based mechanics course emphasizes scientific communication as one of its learning goals, and to that end, we gave our students a series of four peer-evaluation assignments intended to develop…
An active learning physics course (treatment) was re-organized in an attempt to increase students' problem solving abilities. This re-organized course covered all of the relevant concepts in the first 6 weeks with the final 4 weeks spent in…
Our main goal is to develop plans to increase physics enrollment. Once again we thoroughly analyze the problem from the beginning and reach the conclusion that the most appropriate starting point in this direction should be to look into…
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.…
The American Physical Society recently released a statement calling on all university physics departments to provide or facilitate access to research experiences for all undergraduate students. In response, we investigated the current…
Improving students' understanding of the nature of experimental physics is often an explicit or implicit goal of undergraduate laboratory physics courses. However, lab activities in traditional lab courses are typically characterized by…
Problem solving is central to physics instruction. Results from Physics Education Research (PER), however, demonstrate that traditional ways of teaching with problem solving are inefficient and ineffective for promoting true physics…
Physics has a reputation among majority of life sciences students for being very complicated and tough. If we leave students with this impression, it is likely that students see physics class as useless and irrelevant to life sciences.…
This article describes a curricular innovation designed to help students experience authentic physics inquiry with an emphasis on computational modeling and scientific communication. The educational design centers on a new type of…