Related papers: "Never at rest": developing a conceptual framework…
A conventional general electromagnetic force definition has been widely used to analyze radiation forces in dielectric media in published research works. However in this paper, we would like to indicate that this conventional force…
Quantum field theory has formed the conceptual framework of most of physics for more than sixty years. It incorporates a complete revision of our conception of the nature of matter and existence itself. Yet it is rarely taught, or even…
The suggested approach makes it possible to produce a consistent description of motions of a physical system. It is shown that the concept of force fields defining the systems dynamics is equivalent to the choice of the corresponding metric…
The physics learning is very important to techniques teaching and the engineers upbringing. However, there is evidence that science classes from elementary school through to university are generally failing to provide most students with an…
Student learning of sound waves can be helped through the creation of group-learning classroom materials whose development and design rely on explicit investigations into student understanding. We describe reasoning in terms of sets of…
Wellness and mindfulness act as buzzwords these days, often seen as separate from physics. Yet we know they are important, and everything is related to physics! In this article, we will consider a few simple classroom activities that can…
Too often, physics students are beset by feelings of failure and isolation rather than experiencing the creative joys of discovery that physics has to offer. This dissertation research was founded on the desire of a teacher to make physics…
Studies indicate that pre-existing misconceptions negatively impact the effectiveness of traditional physics education. Research has also shown that activity based instruction improves posttest scores on conceptual evaluations. However, the…
We describe a method for deepening a student's understanding of basic physics by asking the student to express physical ideas in a functional programming language. The method is implemented in a second-year course in computational physics…
Einsteinian physics represents a distinct paradigm shift compared to Newtonian physics. There is worldwide interest in introducing Einsteinian physics concepts early in school curriculum and trials have demonstrated that this is feasible.…
The physics that underpins modern technology is based on Einstein's theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Most school students complete their compulsory science education without being taught any of these Einsteinian concepts. Only…
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…
Quantum physics is considered as one of the most remarkable discoveries of contemporary physics grown during previous century and gradually manifested to the scientific world such as inventions of laser, the transistor, the electron…
We discuss the role of the internal forces and how their work changes the energy of a system. We illustrate the contribution of the internal work to the variation of the system's energy, using a pure mechanical example, a thermodynamical…
Physics education research has probed for the relevance of physics in students' everyday lives. Attitudinal and epistemological surveys have asked students if they think of or use physics in their daily lives. We have previously documented…
Most introductory physics textbooks neglect air resistance in situations where an astute student can observe that it dominates the dynamics. We give examples from many books. Using dimensional analysis we discuss how to estimate the…
During the past several years the authors have developed a new approach to the teaching of Physical Science, a general education course typically found in the curricula of nearly every college and university. This approach, called `Physics…
The current work aims to better understand student course experiences for those who reported negative perceptions in introductory physics. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 students who reported negative perceptions of their…
We review and extend existing frameworks on modeling to develop a new framework that describes model-based reasoning in upper-division physics labs. Constructing and using models are core scientific practices that have gained significant…
We discuss a case study of the influence of epistemology on learning for a student in an introductory college physics course. An analysis of videotaped class work, written work, and interviews indicates that many of the student's…