Related papers: The path and the multi-teaching issues in the coup…
This is the third series of the lab manuals for virtual teaching of introductory physics classes. This covers fluids, waves, thermodynamics, optics, interference, photoelectric effect, atomic spectra, and radiation concepts. A few of these…
As the frontiers of biology become increasingly interdisciplinary, the physics education community has engaged in ongoing efforts to make physics classes more relevant to life sciences majors. These efforts are complicated by the many…
These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…
Statistics students need to develop the capacity to make sense of the staggering amount of information collected in our increasingly data-centered world. Data science is an important part of modern statistics, but our introductory and…
A unified, consistent and simple view of the Faraday law of induction is presented, which consists of two points: discriminating the lab- from the rest-frame electric field and understanding it is the impossibility for both fields to vanish…
Educators and policy-makers have advocated for reform of undergraduate biology education, calling for greater integration of mathematics and physics in the biology curriculum. While these calls reflect the increasingly interdisciplinary…
Identifying the relevant physics principles is a central component of problem solving. A major goal of most introductory physics courses is to help students discern the deep similarities between problems based upon the physics principles so…
The ability to develop, use, and refine models of experimental systems is a nationally recognized learning outcome for undergraduate physics lab courses. However, no assessments of students' model-based reasoning exist for upper-division…
What kind of problem-solving instruction can help students apply what they have learned to solve the new and unfamiliar problems they will encounter in the future? We propose that mathematical sensemaking, the practice of seeking coherence…
Learning is a physical process. Here, we aim to study a simple dynamical system composed of springs and sticks capable of arbitrarily approximating any continuous function. The main idea of our work is to use the sticks to mimic a…
The spring-mass system studied in undergraduate physics laboratories may show complex dynamics due to the simultaneous action of gravitational, elastic, and torsional forces, in addition to air friction. In this paper, we describe a…
Entropy is a difficult concept to teach using real-world examples. Unlike temperature, pressure, volume, or work, it's not a quantity which most students encounter in their day-to-day lives. Even the way entropy is often qualitatively…
Scientific research involves mathematical modelling in the context of an interactive balance between theory, experiment and computation. However, computational methods and tools are still far from being appropriately integrated in the high…
A liquid meniscus, a bending rod (also called elastica) and a simple pendulum are all described by the same non-dimensional equation. The oscillatory regime of the pendulum corresponds to buckling rods and pendant drops, and the…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than contexts, is considered a hallmark of expertise in physics problem solving. With inspiration from a classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, we compared…
There is widespread emphasis on reform in the teaching of introductory statistics at the college level. Underpinning this reform is a consensus among educators and practitioners that traditional curricular materials and pedagogical…
Drawable electronics attract the attention of both educators and innovative circuit engineers due to their affordability and simplicity. This paper focuses on active learning activities related to conducting lines and presents extensible…
Computation is a central aspect of modern science and engineering work, and yet, computational instruction has yet to fully pervade university STEM curricula. In physics, we have begun to integrate computation into our courses in a variety…
In this companion paper, we explore the use of isomorphic problem pairs (IPPs) to assess introductory physics students' ability to solve and successfully transfer problem-solving knowledge from one context to another in mechanics. We call…
The paper describes a curricular framework for introducing microcontroller programming in the University Physics lab. The approach makes use of Modeling Instruction, an effective approach for teaching science at the secondary level in which…