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We describe the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with quantum measurement within the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. We explore the possible origins of these difficulties by analyzing student…
A national survey of physics faculty was conducted to investigate the prevalence and nature of computational instruction in physics courses across the United States. 1246 faculty from 357 unique institutions responded to the survey. The…
From a department being resistant to change to students not buying into the new computational activities, the challenges that are faced with integrating computation into the physics undergraduate curriculum are varied. The Partnership for…
Student attitudes and approaches to problem solving can impact how well they learn physics. Prior research in the US using a validated Attitude and Approaches to Problem Solving (AAPS) survey suggests that there are major differences…
We describe a study focusing on students' and faculty members' reasoning about problems of differing cognitive complexity related to the double-slit experiment (DSE) with single particles. In the first phase of the study, students in…
Computational physics is a key part of what it means to do physics in the twenty-first century. However, upper division computational physics remains a largely understudied area. We set out to understand the experiences of students in an…
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.…
Computation is a central aspect of 21st century physics practice; it is used to model complicated systems, to simulate impossible experiments, and to analyze mountains of data. Physics departments and their faculty are increasingly…
Introductory mechanics ("physics 1") is a critical gateway course for students desiring to pursue a STEM career. A major challenge with this course is that there is a large spread in the students' incoming physics preparation, and this…
Prior research has demonstrated how the realist perspectives of classical physics students can translate into specific beliefs about quantum phenomena when taking an introductory modern physics course. Student beliefs regarding the…
Recent investigations have been carried out on critical analyses of beginning physics teachers confronted with questionable explanations. These studies raise the question of the choices made by teachers for their teaching once they have…
The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in…
Studies examining gender differences in introductory physics show a consensus when it comes to a gender gap on conceptual assessments; however, the story is not as clear when it comes to differences in gendered performance on exams. This…
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'…
Uncertainty is an important concept in physics laboratory instruction. However, little work has examined how students reason about uncertainty beyond the introductory (intro) level. In this work we aimed to compare intro and beyond-intro…
The Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (TUG-K) is a multiple choice test developed by Beichner to assess students' understanding of kinematics graphs. Many of the items on the TUG-K have strong distractor choices which correspond to…
In recent years, computing has become an important part of the way we teach and learn physics. Teachers, both at high school and college levels, now use computational activities in many of their courses. Physics departments are offering…
Identifying and understanding student difficulties with physics content in a wide variety of topical areas is an active research area within the PER community. In many cases, physics topics appear multiple times in different contexts across…
In this study, we examine introductory physics students' ability to perform analogical reasoning between two isomorphic problems which employ the same underlying physics principles but have different surface features. Three hundred and…
Studying for physics exams can be difficult and stressful, especially during a student's introductory year in physics. For students who do not plan to major in physics, the desire to do well is based less on understanding concepts and more…