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Practical methods for quantitative analysis of radial and angular coordinates of leafy organs of vascular plants are presented and applied to published phyllotactic patterns of various real systems from young leaves on a shoot tip to…
Framing affects how students interpret, approach, and accomplish tasks. Little is known, however, about how students frame tasks in physics labs. During the first lab of a sequence designed to teach students about modeling and critical…
Students of visualization come to formal education with an abundance of personal experience. However, one's exposure to graphics through media and education may not be sufficiently diverse to appreciate the nuance and complexity required to…
An appropriate diagram is a required element of a solution building process in physics problem solving and it can transform a given problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving the problem. A major focus while helping…
Physics Education Research (PER) practitioners have engaged in substantial curriculum development and dissemination work in recent years. Yet, it appears that this work has had minimal influence on the fundamental teaching practices of…
Instruction in quantum mechanics is becoming increasingly important as the field is not only a key part of modern physics research, but is also important for emerging technologies. However, many students regard quantum mechanics as a…
An approach to the teaching of electromagnetism to senior undergraduate students, designed for overcoming the fragmentation of the theory is described. As usual it starts from the static case, but it is strictly based on Helmholtz theorem…
The Dirac delta function is a standard mathematical tool that appears repeatedly in the undergraduate physics curriculum in multiple topical areas including electrostatics, and quantum mechanics. While Dirac delta functions are often…
Dirac notation is used commonly in quantum mechanics. However, many upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in physics have difficulties with representations of quantum operators corresponding to observables especially when using…
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…
Reasoning systems with too simple a model of the world and human intent are unable to consider potential negative side effects of their actions and modify their plans to avoid them (e.g., avoiding potential errors). However, hand-encoding…
In light of a recent direct experimental confirmation of a Lorentz contraction of Coulomb field (an electric field of a point charge in a uniform motion), we revisit some common confusions related to it, to be mindful of in teaching the…
Holography as a subject is neglected largely in current physics lessons and in school books. Even though this topic might be complex, it is applicable and viable in the world that we live in. Holography lends itself to further develop…
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…
This work focuses on visualizing uncertainty of local divergence of two-dimensional vector fields. Divergence is one of the fundamental attributes of fluid flows, as it can help domain scientists analyze potential positions of sources…
In this work, I use a survey of senior visualization researchers and thinkers to ideate about the notion of progress in visualization research: how are we growing as a field, what are we building towards, and are our existing methods…
In this paper, we discuss four errors introductory physics students make when attempting to add two inverse-square law vectors. We observe multiple instances in which students 1) add vectors as if they were scalars, 2) project the $r$ (or…
Prior research suggest that introductory physics students have difficulty with graphing and interpreting graphs. Here, we discuss an investigation of student difficulties in translating between mathematical and graphical representations for…
The majority of current textbooks on device physics at the undergraduate level derive the diode equation based on the diffusion of injected minority carriers. Generally the drift of the majority carriers, or the extent of drift, is not…
Previous research has shown that students often struggle to develop an understanding of linear and quadratic relationships. Covariational reasoning has been identified as a way to support this development. This study aims to investigate how…