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This invited paper is a passionate pitch for the significance of logic in scientific education. Logic helps focus on the essential core to identify the foundations of ideas and provides corresponding longevity with the resulting approach to…
The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows, on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to understand…
Prior research suggests that many students believe that the magnitude of the static frictional force is always equal to its maximum value. Here, we examine introductory students' ability to learn from analogical reasoning (with different…
This review presents an overview and analysis of the body of research on special relativity theory (SRT) education at the secondary and lower undergraduate level. There is currently a growing international interest in implementing SRT in…
Large-scale language models are rapidly improving, performing well on a wide variety of tasks with little to no customization. In this work we investigate how language models can support science writing, a challenging writing task that is…
I argue that, contrary to the standard view, one cannot understand the structure and nature of our knowledge in physics without an analysis of the way that observers (and, more generally, measuring instruments and experimental arrangements)…
Scientometric techniques have been remarkably successful at mapping science but they face important difficulties when mapping research for societal problems possibly because they they are derived only from scientific documents and thus do…
Misconception is the difference between a student's idea and his scientific concept. Physics learning needs to be designed by teachers to minimize misconceptions. Different diagnostic tools have been developed and used by researchers to…
Developing and making sense of quantitative models is a core practice of physics. Covariational reasoning -- considering how the changes in one quantity affect changes in another, related quantity -- is an essential part of modeling…
Euclidean geometry has historically played a central role in cultivating logical reasoning and abstract thinking within mathematics education, but has experienced waning emphasis in recent curricula. The resurgence of interest, driven by…
Einsteinian physics represents a distinct paradigm shift compared to Newtonian physics. There is worldwide interest in introducing Einsteinian physics concepts early in school curriculum and trials have demonstrated that this is feasible.…
Cosmology and GR remain largely inaccessible to high-school teaching due to the advanced prerequisites to master these topics. Integrating them into upper secondary teaching is a significant challenge that remains unresolved. This…
I offer one possible explanation of why inertial and gravitational mass are equal in Newtonian gravitation. I then argue that this is an example of a kind of explanation that is not captured by standard philosophical accounts of scientific…
Recent advances in our understanding of the Universe have revolutionized our view of its structure, composition and evolution. However, these new ideas have not necessarily been used to improve the teaching of introductory astronomy…
The key difference between math as math and math in science is that in science we blend our physical knowledge with our knowledge of math. This blending changes the way we put meaning to math and even to the way we interpret mathematical…
Philosophers frequently struggle with the relation of metaphysics to the everyday world, with its practical value, and with its relation to empirical science. This paper distinguishes several different models of the relation between…
This article explores the metaphor of Science as provider of sharp images of our environment, using the epistemological framework of Objective Cognitive Constructivism. These sharp images are conveyed by precise scientific hypotheses that,…
Semantic Similarity is an important application which finds its use in many downstream NLP applications. Though the task is mathematically defined, semantic similarity's essence is to capture the notions of similarity impregnated in humans.…
Machine learning with application to questions in the physical sciences has become a widely used tool, successfully applied to classification, regression and optimization tasks in many areas. Research focus mostly lies in improving the…
I argue that the essence of gravity can be understood only in the context of the universe and that unrecognised implicit retention of Newtonian absolute scale and the impact of thermodynamics have obscured it. Typical attempts to resolve…