Related papers: Student Difficulties with the Dirac Delta Function
One goal of physics instruction is to have students learn to make physical meaning of specific mathematical ideas, concepts, and procedures in different physical settings. As part of research investigating student learning in statistical…
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…
The use of validated conceptual assessments alongside more standard course exams has become standard practice for the introductory courses in many physics departments. These assessments provide a more standard measure of certain learning…
Contribution: We demonstrate that it is feasible to include field specific problems in introductory mathematics courses to motivate engineering students. This is done in a way that still allows large parts of the course to be common to all…
This study investigates a group of high school students in a physics classroom interacting with a computer simulation that simulates the electrostatic interaction as a hockey game, the Electric Field Hockey. The activity featured in this…
Helping students become proficient problem-solvers is one of the primary goals of physics courses. In part 1 of this article, we summarized the vast research on problem-solving relevant for physics instruction, and here we discuss a…
The aim of this paper is to present a didactical sequence that fosters the development of meanings related to fractions, conceived as numbers that can be placed on the number line. The sequence was carried out in various elementary school…
Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students' knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks (the "ConMap" tasks) was developed to probe the…
Let $f$ be a continuous real function defined in a subset of the real line. The standard definition of continuity at a point $x$ allow us to correlate any given epsilon with a (possibly depending of $x$) delta value. This pairing is known…
We discuss how a class of difficult kinematic problems can play an important role in an introductory course in stimulating students' reasoning on more complex physical situations. The problems presented here have an elementary analysis once…
Instructors and students alike are often focused on the grade in programming assignments as a key measure of how well a student is mastering the material and whether a student is struggling. This can be, however, misleading. Especially when…
First year calculus is often taught in a way that is very burdensome to the student. Students have to memorize a diversity of processes for essentially performing the same task. However, many calculus processes can be simplified and…
In biological and synthetic materials, many important processes involve charges that are present in a medium with spatially varying dielectric permittivity. To accurately understand the role of electrostatic interactions in such systems, it…
A primary goal of physics is to create mathematical models that allow both predictions and explanations of physical phenomena. We weave maths extensively into our physics instruction beginning in high school, and the level and complexity of…
There are diverse teaching methodologies to promote both collaborative and individual work in undergraduate physics courses. However, few educational studies seek to understand how students learn and apply new knowledge through open-ended…
In this note we report on an implementation of discovery-oriented problems in courses on Real Analysis and Differential Equations. We explain a type of task-design that gives students the opportunity to conjecture, refute and prove. What is…
Research has shown that both high school and university students' reasoning patterns regarding direct current resistive electric circuits often differ from the currently accepted explanations. At present, there are no standard diagnostic…
We describe a study in which introductory physics students engage in reflection with peers about problem solving. The recitations for an introductory physics course with 200 students were broken into the "Peer Reflection" (PR) group and the…
Throughout introductory physics, students create and interpret free body diagrams in which multiple forces act on an object, typically at a single location (the object's center of mass). The situation increases in difficulty when multiple…
The flipped classroom technique has recently been a focus of attention for many math instructors and pedagogical researchers. Although research on the subject has greatly increased in recent years, it is still debated whether the flipped…