Related papers: Student thinking about the divergence and curl in …
We explore the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with non-relativistic quantum mechanics of a single particle in one spatial dimension. To investigate these difficulties we developed a conceptual survey and…
This work proposes, implements and tests an immersive framework upon Virtual Reality (VR) for comprehension, knowledge development and learning process assisting an improved perception of complex spatial arrangements in AEC in comparison to…
Discrete mathematics and probability theory contain foundational material for computer scientists. Despite their importance, instructors often worry that students will find these courses to be too abstract and seemingly disconnected from…
Physics Education Research (PER) applies a scientific approach to the question, "How do our students think about and learn physics?" PER allows us to explore such intellectually engaging questions as, "What does it mean to understand…
We investigated the epistemological conceptions of the uruguayan Physics teachers and future Physics teachers through the application of the CLASS test (Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey), one of the most accepted instruments…
Throughout introductory physics, students create and interpret free body diagrams in which multiple forces act on an object, typically at a single location (the object's center of mass). The situation increases in difficulty when multiple…
During the last decade we have witnessed an impressive development in so-called interpreted languages and computational environments such as Maple, Mathematica, IDL, Matlab etc. Problems which until recently were typically solved on…
We report on a profession-oriented course we offered at the University of Vienna, aimed at physics education teacher students. The course on Theoretical Classical Mechanics has been conceived and designed from its outset with the explicit…
The transition from secondary to higher education represents a critical point in academic trajectories, particularly in programmes with a strong emphasis on basic sciences. Across different higher education systems, introductory Mathematics…
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…
In this work, the divergence and curl operators are obtained using the coordinate free non rigid basis formulation of differential geometry. Although the authors have attempted to keep the presentation self-contained as much as possible,…
This is a report on a qualitative study of students' learning where a physics computer simulation session is used to supplement lectures on the topic. Drawing on phenomenography as the analytical framework, the students' learning-focuses…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about knowledge and learning can hinder them from…
Students with disabilities are enrolling in postsecondary education in increasing numbers and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) at steady rates since the early 1990s. Specifically, in 2014, the National Center on…
Framing affects how students interpret, approach, and accomplish tasks. Little is known, however, about how students frame tasks in physics labs. During the first lab of a sequence designed to teach students about modeling and critical…
Much of the research done by modern physicists would be impossible without the use of computation. And yet, while computation is a crucial tool of practicing physicists, physics curricula do not generally reflect its importance and utility.…
Favorable outcomes from ongoing research at the University of Colorado Boulder on student learning in junior-level electrostatics (E&M I) have led us to extend this work to upper-division electrodynamics (E&M II). We describe here our…
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…
Computation is becoming an increasingly important part of physics education. However, there are currently few theories of learning that can be used to help explain and predict the unique challenges and affordances associated with…
Oftentimes, Stokes' theorem is derived by using, more or less explicitly, the invariance of the curl of the vector field with respect to translations and rotations. However, this invariance -- which is oftentimes described as the curl being…