Related papers: Making Space to Sensemake: Epistemic Distancing in…
For this study, we compared the attitudes and beliefs about science of physical science (physics and mathematics) and life science (biochemistry and biology) students at the beginning of their university degrees using the CLASS (Colorado…
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…
This article describes an undergraduate physics module at a university in England that places year 3 student physicists in secondary school classrooms for a semester. This is done as a way of introducing them to the occupation of secondary…
Seating location in the classroom can affect student engagement, attention and academic performance by providing better visibility, improved movement, and participation in discussions. Existing studies typically explore how traditional…
In this companion paper, we explore the use of isomorphic problem pairs (IPPs) to assess introductory physics students' ability to solve and successfully transfer problem-solving knowledge from one context to another in mechanics. We call…
The purpose of the following paper is to demonstrate that the "limits of physics" are in a very important way determined by the conceptual framework and language of discourse that we use to describe physical reality. In this paper we…
We use the theories of identity statuses and communities of practice to describe three different case studies of students finding their paths through undergraduate physics and developing a physics subject-specific identity. Each case study…
The objective of our study is to ascertain the present learning behaviors, driving forces, and assessment techniques as perceived by first-year students, and to examine them through the lens of the most recent developments (pandemic, shift…
We developed a two-day physics class that uses a nearby forest as a teaching location. Using low-cost material, students design and carry out physics projects outside of the usual controlled environment that is a classroom. In this way they…
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…
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…
Physics laboratory courses have been generally acknowledged as an important component of the undergraduate curriculum, particularly with respect to developing students' interest in, and understanding of, experimental physics. There are a…
Traditional high-stakes summative assessments--timed, in-class exams accounting for a large percentage of the term's overall grade--have often received criticism from the educational community. Such assessments tend to prize a particular…
Neurodivergent people experience the world, conceptualize scientific concepts, and engage with meaning-making differently than their neurotypical peers. When these differences are actualized in an institutional setting, such as higher…
The development of technologies of multimedia, linked to that of Internet and democratization of high speed, has made henceforth E-learning possible for learners being in virtual classes and geographically distributed. One benefit to taking…
To develop an increase in societal interest in the fundamental sciences of particle physics and particularly for maintaining the support structures needed to succeed in experiments that take several decades to develop and complete, requires…
Collaboration among students is fundamental for knowledge building and competency development. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of student collaboration depends on the extent that these interactions take place under conditions that favor…
The literature on ethics and sustainability in mathematics and its education is increasingly complex and fragmented, potentially leading to communication breakdowns between different scholarly traditions. To address this, the paper…
We discuss a study in a first year college introductory physics course for physical science and engineering majors that shows that women, on average, feel less recognized by their physics instructors than men as students who can excel in…
In the literature, there have been several methods and definitions for working out if two theories are "equivalent" (essentially the same) or not. In this article, we do something subtler. We provide means to measure distances (and explore…