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Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to…
We have analyzed the impact of taking an associated lab course on the scores on final exam questions in two large introductory physics courses. Approximately a third of the students who completed each course also took an accompanying…
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…
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,…
At the University of Colorado Boulder, as part of our broader efforts to transform middle- and upper-division physics courses, we research students' difficulties with particular concepts, methods, and tools in classical mechanics,…
Across almost all scientific disciplines, the instruments that record our experimental data and the methods required for storage and data analysis are rapidly increasing in complexity. This gives rise to the need for scientific communities…
Analogical reasoning plays a critical role in human cognition, enabling us to understand new concepts by associating them with familiar ones. Previous research in the AI community has mainly focused on identifying and generating analogies…
The Georgia Tech blended introductory calculus-based mechanics course emphasizes scientific communication as one of its learning goals, and to that end, we gave our students a series of four peer-evaluation assignments intended to develop…
While the positive outcomes of undergraduate research experiences (UREs) have been extensively categorized, the mechanisms for those outcomes are less understood. Through lightly structured focus group interviews, we have extracted the…
Students often begin physics courses with misconceptions rooted in everyday experience and intuition, which can be resistant to change. While research has identified strategies for addressing misconceptions across physics, it remains…
With limited time available in the classroom, e-learning tools can supplement in-class learning by providing opportunities for students to study and learn outside of class. Such tools can be especially helpful for students who lack adequate…
Effective physics learning, especially in complex topics, requires balancing mathematical formalism with conceptual understanding. Conceptual problem-solving involves connecting math to physical reality, and using an epistemological…
In introductory physics laboratory instruction, students often expect to confirm or demonstrate textbook physics concepts (Wilcox & Lewandowski, 2017; Hu & Zwickl, 2017; Hu & Zwickl, 2018). This expectation is largely undesirable: labs that…
Modeling the creative mathematical sensemaking that characterizes expert thinking in physics is typically a struggle for new learners. To help students learn to reason this way, we created a set of supplemental activities called Physics…
In an effort to improve the quality of citizen engagement in workplace, politics, and other domains in which quantitative reasoning plays an important role, Quantitative Literacy (QL) has become the focus of considerable research and…
The milq approach to quantum physics for high schools focuses on the conceptual questions of quantum physics. Students should be given the opportunity to engage with the world view of modern physics. The aim is to achieve a conceptually…
Sliding friction is usually introduced in high school, but rarely through activities in laboratory. A qualitative introduction to friction is presented by proposing exploration of different kind of materials in order to suggest which…
While laboratory instruction is a cornerstone of physics education, the impact of student behaviours in labs on retention, persistence in the field, and the formation of students' physics identity remains an open question. In this study, we…
Integrating computation into physics teaching is a curricular move that, at present, has been predominately studied for its cognitive impacts. However, if this modality of instruction shifts how students engage with physics, we argue there…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than surface features or contexts, is considered one of several proxy predictors of expertise in problem solving. With inspiration from the classic study by Chi,…