Related papers: Toward Better Physics Labs for Future Biologists
Theory and empirical science should be in constant dialogue, but often find it hard to understand one another. Here we describe a graduate-level university course we developed to improve matters. The course was designed to help…
The objective of physics laboratory training is to develop, in students, a variety of important cognitive and psycho-motor abilities related to experimental physics. These include conceptual understanding, procedural understanding,…
Students who serve as Learning Assistants (LAs) and have the opportunity to teach the content they are learning, while also studying effective teaching pedagogy, have demonstrated achievement gains in advanced content courses and positive…
While it is well known which curricular practices can improve student performance on measures of conceptual understanding, the sustaining of these practices and the role of faculty members in implementing these practices are less well…
To develop an increase in societal interest in the fundamental sciences of particle physics and particularly for maintaining the support structures needed to succeed in experiments that take several decades to develop and complete, requires…
Computational physics is a key part of what it means to do physics in the twenty-first century. However, upper division computational physics remains a largely understudied area. We set out to understand the experiences of students in an…
Our recent study showed that two lab courses, whose goals were exclusively to reinforce material developed in the lecture courses, do not have any impact on exam performance at the 1% level. In this study, we replicated this analysis with a…
Experience with experimental and computational work are important components of students' understanding of the practice of physics. Physics departments typically use specific experimental lab courses and computational lab courses to develop…
Physics is introduced as a basic matter in the curricula of professional schools (i.e. schools for agriculture, electronic or chemistry experts). Students meet physics in the early years of their training and then continue in vocational…
In response to national calls to better align physics laboratory courses with the way physicists engage in research, we have developed an epistemology and expectations survey to assess how students perceive the nature of physics experiments…
Since 2006, the Pigelleto's Summer School of Physics is an important appointment for orienting students toward physics. It is organized as a full immersion school on actual topics in physics or in fields rarely pursued in high school, i.e.…
Teaching physics to biologists requires far more than making the course for engineers mathematically less rigorous and adding in a few superficial biological problems. What is needed is for physicists to work closely with biologists to…
Physics education research has used quantitative modeling techniques to explore learning, affect, and other aspects of physics education. However, these studies have rarely examined the predictive output of the models, instead focusing on…
Since 2010, the Yale physics department has offered a novel calculus-based introductory physics for the life science (IPLS) sequence, that re-imagines the IPLS syllabus to include a selection of biologically and medically relevant topics,…
When considering performing an Introductory Physics for Life Sciences course transformation for one's own institution, life science majors' achievement goals are a necessary consideration to ensure the pedagogical transformation will be…
Physics Beyond Colliders is an exploratory study aimed at exploiting the full scientific potential of CERN's accelerator complex and its scientific infrastructure in the next two decades through projects complementary to the LHC, HL-LHC and…
Recruiting and retaining highly qualified physics and physical science teachers is critical for maintaining America's global competitiveness. Unfortunately, only one third of the high school teachers in physics have a degree in physics and…
With an investigation into how students in a physics Master of science program make sense of their whole first year study experience in one of the years following a programme reform, we try to offer insights and advice to consider when…
Recently, there have been several national calls to emphasize physics practices and skills within laboratory courses. In this paper, we describe the redesign and implementation of a two-course sequence of algebra-based physics laboratories…
As part of a large-scale assessment project at a large university, we administered weekly pre-tests and bi-weekly post-tests in the recitation sections of our introductory classes over four semesters from Spring 2010 through Fall 2011. The…