Related papers: Statistical uncertainty in educational experiment …
Measurement uncertainty and experimental error are important concepts taught in undergraduate physics laboratories. Although student ideas about error and uncertainty in introductory classical mechanics lab experiments have been studied…
The incorporation of uncertainties to calculations of signal significance in planned experiments is an actual task. Several approaches to this problem are discussed. We present a procedure for taking into account the systematic uncertainty…
Uncertainty is an important and fundamental concept in physics education. Students are often first exposed to uncertainty in introductory labs, expand their knowledge across lab courses, and then are introduced to quantum mechanical…
Educators must make decisions about learner expectations and skills on which to focus when it comes to laboratory activities. There are various approaches but the general pattern is to encourage students to measure ordered pairs, plot a…
We describe a straightforward modification of frequently invoked methods for the determination of the statistical significance of a gamma-ray signal observed in a counting process. A simple criterion is proposed to decide whether a set of…
Interpreting experimental data in high school experiments can be a difficult task for students, especially when there is large variation in the data. At the same time, calculating the standard deviation poses a challenge for students. In…
Laboratory (laser and Z-pinch) opacity measurements of well-characterized plasmas provide data to assist inertial confinement fusion, astrophysics and atomic-physics research. In order to test the atomic-physics codes devoted to the…
Measurement uncertainty is an important topic in the undergraduate laboratory curriculum. Previous research on student thinking about experimental measurement uncertainty has focused primarily on introductory-level students' procedural…
Science students must deal with the errors inherent to all physical measurements and be conscious of the necessity to express their as a best estimate and a range of uncertainty. Errors are routinely classified as statistical or systematic.…
Searches for new astrophysical phenomena often involve several sources of non-random uncertainties which can lead to highly misleading results. Among these, model-uncertainty arising from background mismodelling can dramatically compromise…
We present a home-lab experimental activity, successfully proposed to our students during covid19 pandemic, based on \textit{state-of-the-art} technologies to teach error analysis and uncertainties to science and engineering students. In…
The field of gamma ray astronomy relies heavily on the statistical analysis of data. Because of the paucity of data, and the often large errors associated with detecting gamma rays, analysis and interpretation of the data require…
The proper choice of a measurement technique that minimizes systematic and random uncertainty is an essential part of experimental physics. These issues are difficult to teach in the introductory laboratory, though: because most experiments…
We describe the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with quantum measurement within the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. We explore the possible origins of these difficulties by analyzing student…
Measurement uncertainty plays a critical role in the process of experimental physics. It is useful to be able to assess student proficiency around the topic to iteratively improve instruction and student learning. For the topic of…
Several experiments in high-energy physics and astrophysics can be treated as on/off measurements, where an observation potentially containing a new source or effect ("on" measurement) is contrasted with a background-only observation free…
In this article we study the problem of quantifying the uncertainty in an experiment with a technical system. We propose new density estimates which combine observed data of the technical system and simulated data from an (imperfect)…
Science students must deal with the errors inherent to all physical measurements and be conscious of the need to expressvthem as a best estimate and a range of uncertainty. Errors are routinely classified as statistical or systematic.…
Several cosmological measurements have attained significant levels of maturity and accuracy over the last decade. Continuing this trend, future observations promise measurements of the statistics of the cosmic mass distribution at an…
The aim of this study is to investigate the decisions and reasoning of undergraduate students when choosing simple measurement instruments in an introductory physics laboratory course. For this study, we have developed a questionnaire and…