Related papers: Unpacking Students' Use of Mathematics in Upper-di…
Differentiation is a mathematical skill applied throughout science in order to describe the change of a function with respect to a dependent variable. Thus, an intuitive understanding of differentiation is necessary to work with the…
Quantum mechanics is challenging even for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Dirac notation is a convenient notation used extensively in quantum mechanics. We have been investigating the difficulties that the advanced…
Quantum Computing is an exciting field that draws from information theory, computer science, mathematics, and quantum physics to process information in fundamentally new ways. There is an ongoing race to develop practical quantum computers…
We address the question "How do students make sense of Physics from the point of view of constituting physics knowledge?". A phenomenographic study is described as a result of which we present six qualitatively different ways in which…
We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students'…
The learning of mathematics starts early but remains far from any theoretical considerations: pupils' mathematical knowledge is first rooted in pragmatic evidence or conforms to procedures taught. However, learners develop a knowledge which…
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…
Students in introductory calculus-based physics not only have difficulty understanding the fundamental physical concepts, they often have difficulty relating those concepts to the mathematics they have learned in math courses. This produces…
Introducing inner-city high school students to program design presents unique challenges. The typical assumptions of an introductory programming course, like students understand what variables and functions are, may not be safe. Therefore,…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a give problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. A major focus while helping introductory physics students learn problem…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
Very little is known about how the nature of expertise in introductory and advanced courses compares in knowledge-rich domains such as physics. We develop a framework to compare the similarities and differences between learning and patterns…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
Developing expert-like problem-solving skills is a central goal of undergraduate physics education. In this study, we investigate the impact of teaching explicit problem-solving frameworks, combined with deliberate practice, on students'…
Prior research has shown that physics students often think about experimental procedures and data analysis very differently from experts. One key framework for analyzing student thinking has found that student thinking is more point-like,…
An important goal of graduate physics core courses is to help students develop expertise in problem solving and improve their reasoning and meta-cognitive skills. We explore the conceptual difficulties of physics graduate students by…
Usually the first course in mathematics is calculus. Its a core course in the curriculum of the Business, Engineering and the Sciences. However many students face difficulties to learn calculus. These difficulties are often caused by the…
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…
This article deals with peer-assessment in the context of higher education teaching in mathematics, and examines the nature of student activity when assessing work produced by peers. After an overview of research on peer assessment, we…
Despite the recognition that reflection is an essential part of problem solving, it is often not emphasized in upper-division physics courses. In this paper, we discuss homework corrections (HWCs) as a pedagogical tool to motivate…