Related papers: "Never at rest": developing a conceptual framework…
Even though there has been a tremendous amount of research done in how to help students learn physics, students are still coming away missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: why bother with physics? Students learn fundamental laws and how to…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by educators and physics education researchers. Many of the items on the FCI have strong distractor choices…
As part of a longitudinal study into identity development in upper-level physics students, a phenomenographic research method was used to examine students' perceptions of what it means to be a physicist. The results revealed four different…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
This innovative practice category paper presents an innovative framework for teaching Reinforcement Learning (RL) at the undergraduate level. Recognizing the challenges posed by the complex theoretical foundations of the subject and the…
One area of physics education research has focused on the nature of ontologies (mental categorizations of concepts, substances and processes), and how they might be used to gain insight into student thinking when learning classical physics.…
Most of the logical objections against the classical laws of motion, as they are usually presented in textbooks, centre on the fact that defining force in terms of mass and acceleration, the first two laws are mere assertions of concepts to…
The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows, on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to understand…
Developing expertise in physics requires appropriate integration and assimilation of physics and mathematics. Instructors and students often describe physics courses in terms of their emphasis on conceptual and quantitative problem-solving.…
The axiomatic definition of mass in classical mechanics, outlined by Mach in the second half of 19th century and improved by several authors, is simplified and extended to the theory of special relativity. According to the extended…
The large number of published articles in physics journals under the title "Comments on ..." and "Reply to ..." is indicative that the conceptual understanding of physical phenomena is very elusive and hard to grasp even to experts, but it…
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'…
In the symposium contributions we discuss research in physics education and the consequences of its results for physics teaching. The symposium presents four different aspects of physics teaching and learning, but all of them have…
We describe a course designed to help future educators build an integrated understanding of the different elements of physics education research (PER), including: research into student learning, content knowledge from the perspective of how…
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…
A priority of physics instruction is to help students make the connection between the formulae they think they are required to memorize and the real world in which they interact every day. If you ask students to describe a situation in real…
As part of a longitudinal study into identity development in upper-level physics students, we used a phenomenographic research method to examine students' perceptions of what it means to be a physicist. The results revealed four different…
This resource letter intends to provide physics instructors - particularly graduate student teaching assistants - at the introductory university level with a small but representative collection of resources to acquire a familiarity with…
Textbooks play a fundamental role in teaching and learning in school science classrooms. In this paper we investigate the presentation of the nature of the electromagnetic field in a dozen of the world's most popular introductory university…
Contribution: This secondary study examines the literature on immersive learning frameworks and reviews their state of the art. Frameworks have been categorized according to their purpose. In addition, the elements that compose them were…