Related papers: Developing Tutorials for Advanced Physics Students…
This paper shares a classroom story from Fall 2022 to Spring 2025 about a learner centered routine in undergraduate mathematics. I use four steps: an opening question, a short mini lecture about meaning, structured small group work, and a…
Grading can shape students' learning and encourage use of effective problem solving practices. Teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for grading student solutions and providing feedback, thus, their perceptions of grading may…
As a result of the deep modifications of the French physics and chemistry curricula in upper secondary school during these last three years, the physics department of the Universit\'e Paris Diderot (France) wished to develop a renovation…
Calls for reform to instructional labs means many instructors and departments are facing the daunting task of identifying goals for their introductory lab courses. Fortunately, the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) released a…
Teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for grading student solutions. Since grading communicates instructors' expectations, TAs' grading decisions play a crucial role in forming students' approaches to problem solving (PS) in…
Systematic observations of student gestures can not only fill in gaps in students' verbal expressions, but can also offer valuable information about student ideas, including their source, their novelty to the speaker, and their construction…
Expert problem solvers are characterized by continuous evaluation of their progress towards a solution. One characteristic of expertise is self-diagnosis directed towards elaboration of the solvers' conceptual understanding, knowledge…
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.…
A national survey of physics faculty was conducted to investigate the prevalence and nature of computational instruction in physics courses across the United States. 1246 faculty from 357 unique institutions responded to the survey. The…
One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between formal physical principles and personal experience. However, research has shown that awareness of connections between…
Most, if not all, physics undergraduate degree programs include instructional lab experiences. Physics lab instructors, both faculty and staff, are instrumental to student learning in instructional physics labs. However, the faculty-staff…
The Young Physicists' Tournament (YPT) inspires high-school students to immerse themselves into an inquiry process closely resembling the real physics research. Using questionnaires' replies from the students and their teachers engaged in…
In experimental physics, lab notebooks play an essential role in the research process. For all of the ubiquity of lab notebooks, little formal attention has been paid to addressing what is considered `best practice' for scientific…
To deepen do-it-yourself (DIY) technology in the physics classroom, we seek to highlight the Open Source Physics (OSP) community of educators that engage, enable and empower teachers as learners so that we create DIY technology…
According to the literature, mobile devices as experimental tools (MDET) can offer educational benefits by creating authentic, real-life contexts for physics learning, enhancing student motivation through the use of familiar technology, and…
We review and extend existing frameworks on modeling to develop a new framework that describes model-based reasoning in upper-division physics labs. Constructing and using models are core scientific practices that have gained significant…
Increasingly, courses on Empirical Software Engineering research methods are being offered in higher education institutes across the world, mostly at the M.Sc. and Ph.D. levels. While the need for such courses is evident and in line with…
Development of conceptual multiple-choice tests related to a particular physics topic is important for designing research-based learning tools to reduce the difficulties. We explore the difficulties that the advanced undergraduate and…
Building on successful work on studying and transforming our senior-level Advanced Lab course, we have transformed our junior-level Electronics course to engage students in a variety of authentic scientific practices, including…
Computation is becoming an increasingly important part of physics education. However, there are currently few theories of learning that can be used to help explain and predict the unique challenges and affordances associated with…