Related papers: Enhancing Introductory Student Motivation with a M…
This study investigates differences in student participation rates between in-class and online administrations of research-based assessments. A sample of 1,310 students from 25 sections of 3 different introductory physics courses over two…
We present outcomes from curricular changes made to an introductory calculus-based physics course whose audience is primarily life science majors, the majority of whom plan to pursue post-baccalaureate studies in medical and scientific…
Performance in introductory courses, particularly physics, is often crucial for student success in STEM majors and can impact an individual's tendency to persist in their chosen field. To enhance students' individual learning experiences,…
Helping students learn to think like a physicist is an important goal of many introductory physics courses. One characteristic distinguishing more experienced physicists from novice students is that they make better use of problem solving…
Too often, physics students are beset by feelings of failure and isolation rather than experiencing the creative joys of discovery that physics has to offer. This dissertation research was founded on the desire of a teacher to make physics…
Computational thinking has been a recent focus of education research within the sciences. However, there is a dearth of scholarly literature on how best to teach and to assess this topic, especially in disciplinary science courses. Physics…
This paper describes our large reformed introductory physics course at UC Davis, which bioscience students have been taking since 1996. The central feature of this course is a focus on sense-making by the students during the five hours per…
Student-to-student interactions are foundational to many active learning environments, but are most often studied using qualitative methods. Network analysis tools provide a quantitative complement to this picture, allowing researchers to…
We have analyzed the impact of taking an associated lab course on the scores on final exam questions in two large introductory physics courses. Approximately a third of the students who completed each course also took an accompanying…
In the rapidly evolving field of computer science education, novel approaches to teaching fundamental concepts are crucial for engaging a diverse student body. Given the growing demand for a computing-skilled workforce, it is essential to…
We discuss the development of interactive video tutorial-based problems to help introductory physics students learn effective problem solving heuristics. The video tutorials present problem solving strategies using concrete examples in an…
It is well documented that students sometimes resist active learning techniques. A recent study showed how students believed that they learned less in active learning classrooms than they learned in lectures, even though they learned more.…
We report on the evolution of the largest physics course at the Technical University Berlin during the COVID-19 pandemic, which boosted the development of online learning content, electronic assessments, and, not at least, the…
The traditional pedagogical paradigm in physics is based on a deductive approach. However, with the recent advances in information technology, we are facing a dramatic increase in the amount of readily available information; hence, the…
We have designed an introductory laboratory course that engaged first-year undergraduate students in two complementary types of iteration: (1) iterative improvement of experiments through cycles of modeling systems, designing experiments,…
This paper presents a novel approach to understand specific student behavior in MOOCs. Instructors currently perceive participants only as one homogeneous group. In order to improve learning outcomes, they encourage students to get active…
When we teach physics to prospective scientists and engineers we are teaching more than the "facts" of physics - more, even, than the methods and concepts of physics. We are introducing them to a complex culture - a mode of thinking and the…
Active methodologies aim to develop a critical sense of what is learned, relating theoretical concepts to the practical environment. In this work, we propose an active teaching-learning methodology for laboratory classes in which the…
Introductory undergraduate courses in classical physics stress a perspective that can be characterized as realist; from this perspective, all physical properties of a classical system can be simultaneously specified and thus determined at…
Introductory mechanics ("physics 1") is a critical gateway course for students desiring to pursue a STEM career. A major challenge with this course is that there is a large spread in the students' incoming physics preparation, and this…