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We examine the relationship between homework completion and exam performance for students having different physics aptitudes for five different semesters of an introductory electricity and magnetism course. In our analysis, we plot exam…
University students taking introductory physics are generally successful executing mathematical procedures in context, but often struggle with the use of mathematical concepts for sense making. Physics instructors note that their students…
We investigate learning difficulties among second-year students on electromagnetism courses when they apply Amp\`ere-Maxwell's law. Using phenomenography, we analysed written answers from 65 undergraduate physics students to four questions…
It is generally believed that physical laws, reflecting an inherent order in the universe, are ordained by nature. However, in modern physics the observer plays a central role raising questions about how an observer-centric physics can…
Introductory physics labs can be designed and studied using the Communities of Practice framework, where a group of members pursues a common set of goals by learning and implementing a set of practices. Studies of student preferences and…
Students are taught several models of conductivity, both at the introductory and the advanced level. From early macroscopic models of current flow in circuits, through the discussion of microscopic particle descriptions of electrons flowing…
A common learning goal for modern physics instructors is for students to recognize a difference between the experimental uncertainty of classical physics and the fundamental uncertainty of quantum mechanics. Our studies suggest this…
The Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey (EMCS) is a multiple-choice survey that contains conceptual problems involving a variety of energy and momentum concepts covered in a typical introductory physics course for science and engineering…
A combination of observation, theory, modeling, and laboratory plasma experiments provides a multifaceted approach to develop a much greater understanding of how magnetic fields arise in galactic settings and how these magnetic fields…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a give problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. A major focus while helping introductory physics students learn problem…
A simple model of eddy currents in which current is computed solely from magnetic forces acting on electrons proves accessible to introductory students and gives a good qualitative account of eddy current forces. However, this model cannot…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by a variety of educators and physics education researchers. One reason for this extensive use is that many of the…
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…
Prior research suggest that introductory physics students have difficulty with graphing and interpreting graphs. Here, we discuss an investigation of student difficulties in translating between mathematical and graphical representations for…
The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to…
Very little is known about how the nature of expertise in introductory and advanced courses compares in knowledge-rich domains such as physics. We develop a framework to compare the similarities and differences between learning and patterns…
In this paper, we discuss four errors introductory physics students make when attempting to add two inverse-square law vectors. We observe multiple instances in which students 1) add vectors as if they were scalars, 2) project the $r$ (or…
Students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can greatly impact their actual problem solving practices and also influence their motivation to learn and ultimately the development of expertise. We developed and validated…
Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know the common alternate conceptions of introductory physics students and explicitly take into account common student difficulties in their instructional design. Here, we…
The ability to flexibly transform between different representations (e.g., from mathematical to graphical representations) of the same concept is a hallmark of expertise. Prior research suggests that many introductory physics students show…