Related papers: Development and Uses of Upper-division Conceptual …
We introduce PHYSICS, a comprehensive benchmark for university-level physics problem solving. It contains 1297 expert-annotated problems covering six core areas: classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical…
In physics education research, instructors and researchers often use research-based assessments (RBAs) to assess students' skills and knowledge. In this paper, we support the development of a mechanics cognitive diagnostic to test and…
Computational thinking has been a recent focus of education research within the sciences. However, there is a dearth of scholarly literature on how best to teach and to assess this topic, especially in disciplinary science courses. Physics…
Continuous engineering of autonomous driving functions commonly requires deploying vehicles in road testing to obtain inputs that cause problematic decisions. Although the discovery leads to producing an improved system, it also challenges…
We discuss the development and validation of a conceptual multiple-choice survey instrument called the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws (STPFaSL) suitable for introductory physics courses. The survey instrument…
A survey was developed to probe student understanding of quantum mechanics at the beginning of graduate instruction. The survey was administered to 202 physics graduate students enrolled in first-year quantum mechanics courses from seven…
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…
Prior research has demonstrated how the realist perspectives of classical physics students can translate into specific beliefs about quantum phenomena when taking an introductory modern physics course. Student beliefs regarding the…
Implementing a laboratory activity involves a complex interplay among learning goals, available resources, feedback about the existing course, best practices for teaching, and an overall philosophy about teaching labs. Building on our…
Many calls to improve science education in college and university settings have focused on improving instructor pedagogy. Meanwhile, science education at the K-12 level is undergoing significant changes as a result of the emphasis on…
There are a plethora of concept inventories in physics available for faculty to use, but it is not always clear exactly why you would use these tests, or how you should administer them and interpret the results. These multiple-choice…
Education is a goal-oriented field. But if we want to treat education scientifically so we can accumulate, evaluate, and refine what we learn, then we must develop a theoretical framework that is strongly rooted in objective observations…
We describe the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with quantum measurement within the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. We explore the possible origins of these difficulties by analyzing student…
We describe how graduate students categorize introductory mechanics problems based on the similarity of their solutions. Graduate students were asked at the end of a teaching assistant training class to categorize problems from their own…
We discuss the development, implementation, and assessment of a course for science undergraduates designed to help them develop an awareness and a deeper appreciation of the intellectual demands of physics teaching. The course focused on…
Oral exams were common historically across academia, though their popularity has recently fallen. Many argue against them as an assessment technique because they are vulnerable to bias and subjectivity, difficult to administer, and…
Despite continual learning's long and well-established academic history, its application in real-world scenarios remains rather limited. This paper contends that this gap is attributable to a misalignment between the actual challenges of…
Identifying and understanding student difficulties with physics content in a wide variety of topical areas is an active research area within the PER community. In many cases, physics topics appear multiple times in different contexts across…
Making meaning with math in physics requires blending physical conceptual knowledge with mathematical symbology. Students in introductory physics classes often struggle with this, but it is an essential component of learning how to think…
Over the last five years, the McGill University Office of Science Education (OSE) has partnered with faculty members from the Department of Physics to form an education research group with the aim of charting the progression of student…