Related papers: Students' Interdisciplinary Reasoning about "High-…
Formally investigating the sources of students' difficulties around specific subjects is crucial for developing appropriate strategies to help students. We have been studying difficulties in understanding magnetism encountered by students…
Recent studies reported that adenosine triphosphate (ATP) could inhibit as well as enhance the phase separation in prion-like proteins. The molecular mechanism underlying such a puzzling phenomenon remains elusive. Here, taking the fused in…
Student learning in upper division thermal physics has not been studied to the same extent as in other courses like electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. Studies addressing reasoning and learning at the graduate level are even more…
Uncertainty is an important concept in physics laboratory instruction. However, little work has examined how students reason about uncertainty beyond the introductory (intro) level. In this work we aimed to compare intro and beyond-intro…
Boundary conditions (BCs) are considered as an important topic that advanced physics under- graduates are expected to understand and apply. We report findings from an investigation of student difficulties using boundary conditions (BCs) in…
A common feature of the recent calls for reform of the undergraduate biology curriculum has been for better coordination between biology and the courses from the allied disciplines of mathematics, chemistry, and physics. Physics has lagged…
In this article, we reflect upon our positive experiences incorporating or working on extra credit projects in algebra-based introductory physics that asked students to connect physics with humanities, social sciences, and everyday life. We…
In response to increasing calls for the reform of the undergraduate science curriculum for life science majors and pre-medical students (Bio2010, Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians, Vision & Change), an interdisciplinary team has…
Biophysics is a subject that is spread over many disciplines and transcends the skills and knowledge of the individual student. This makes it challenging both to teach and to learn. Educational materials are described to aid in teaching…
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…
The research reported in this article represents a systematic, multi-year investigation of student understanding of the behavior of bipolar junction transistor circuits using a variety of different tasks to isolate and probe key aspects of…
We discuss an investigation exploring students' difficulties with equations involving resistance, capacitance and inductance. We find that introductory physics students have great difficulty understanding, e.g., how the resistance of an…
Research has linked a student's affect to her epistemology (Boaler & Greeno, 2000), but those constructs often apply broadly to a discipline and/or classroom culture. Independently, an emerging line of research shows that a student in a…
Traditional power systems education and training is flanked by the demand for coping with the rising complexity of energy systems, like the integration of renewable and distributed generation, communication, control and information…
Researchers have pinpointed recognition from others as one of the most important dimensions of students' science and engineering identity. Studies, however, have found gender biases in students' recognition of their peers, with inconsistent…
This article describes an undergraduate physics module at a university in England that places year 3 student physicists in secondary school classrooms for a semester. This is done as a way of introducing them to the occupation of secondary…
Physics students can encounter difficulties in physics problem solving as a result of failing to use knowledge that they have but do not perceive as relevant or appropriate. In previous work the authors have demonstrated that some of these…
This article addresses broad trends in interdisciplinary research in physics where interactions with colleagues in fields such as computer science, ecology, or economics can often be derailed by unintentional clashes of methodologies and…
Adenosine 5'-triphosphate (ATP) is the nearly ubiquitous "energy currency" of living organisms, and thus is a crucial participant in the majority of enzymatic reactions. The standard models in enzyme kinetics generally ignore the temporal…
Learning to think like a physicist (LTP) is often cited as a central goal of graduate physics education, yet what this means in practice and the extent to which physics graduate education prepares students to develop LTP and view LTP as…