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Formally investigating the sources of students' difficulties around specific subjects is crucial for developing appropriate strategies to help students. We have been studying difficulties in understanding magnetism encountered by students…
Expanding our knowledge of student difficulties in advanced undergraduate electromagnetism is essential if we are to develop effective instructional interventions. Drawing on an analysis of course materials, in-class observations and…
We discuss the clusters of resources that emerge when upper-division students write about electromagnetic fields in linear materials. The data analyzed for this paper comes from students' written tests in an upper-division electricity and…
A thoughtless treatment of Maxwell's equations can lead to the interpretation of the existence of a causal relationship between their different terms and, therefore, that an electric field that varies in time generates a magnetic one and…
Helping students learn why Gauss' law can or cannot be easily applied to determine the strength of the electric field at various points for a particular charge distribution, and then helping them learn to determine the shape of the Gaussian…
Highly successful students, as measured by grades and by scores on the Force Concept Inventory, still struggle with fundamental concepts in mathematics and physics. These difficulties, which turn physics into parrot learning and include…
We discuss an investigation exploring students' difficulties with equations involving resistance, capacitance and inductance. We find that introductory physics students have great difficulty understanding, e.g., how the resistance of an…
This paper reports on a study of student understanding of induced EMF. Students enrolled in a physics lab course completed a pretest and posttest that included questions about induced EMF. Following the posttest, some of those students…
We investigate introductory physics students' difficulties in translating between mathematical and graphical representations and the effect of scaffolding on students' performance. We gave a typical problem that can be solved using Gauss's…
We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students'…
We discuss research involving the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) to evaluate one aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of teaching assistants (TAs): the knowledge of introductory students' alternate conceptions…
This paper re-centres the discussion of student learning in physics to focus on context. In order to do so, a theoretically-motivated understanding of context is developed. Given a well-defined notion of context, data from a novel…
We have been investigating the difficulties that students in upper-level undergraduate courses have in determining the probability distribution for measuring energy and position as a function of time when the initial wave function is…
We investigated the common difficulties that students have with concepts related to rotational and rolling motion covered in the introductory physics courses. We compared the performance of calculus- and algebra-based introductory physics…
To make physics experiments more directly relevant to everyday life and help students realize how their smart phones or tablets can be used as sensors for scientific measurements, we designed two introductory physics experiments to measure…
The role of the observers is frequently obscured in the literature, either by writing equations in a coordinate system implicitly pertaining to some specific observer or by entangling the invariance and the observer dependence of physical…
The magnetic field is traditionally presented as a (pseudo)vector quantity, tied closely to the cross product. Though familiar to experts, many students find these ideas challenging and full of subtleties. Building on earlier work in…
Upper-division physics students spend much of their time solving problems. In addition to their basic skills and background, their epistemic framing can form an important part of their ability to learn physics from these problems.…
An appropriate diagram is a required element of a solution building process in physics problem solving and it can transform a given problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving the problem. A major focus while helping…
We investigate the difficulties that students in calculus-based introductory physics courses have with the concepts of symmetry, electric field, and electric flux which are important for applying Gauss's law. The determination of the…