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English Language Learners (ELLs) are frequently left on the periphery of classroom interactions. Due to misalignment of language skills, teachers and peers communicate with these students less often, decreasing the number of opportunities…

The method of images (MoI) is a valuable technique for solving certain electrostatic boundary value problems consisting of charge density near conductor(s). We developed and validated an inquiry-based tutorial on MoI to help students learn…

Separation of variables can be a powerful technique for solving many of the partial differential equations that arise in physics contexts. Upper-division physics students encounter this technique in multiple topical areas including…

We discuss the development and evaluation of five research-based tutorials on Coulomb's law, superposition, symmetry and Gauss's Law to help students in the calculus-based introductory physics courses learn these concepts. We discuss the…

We discuss a case study of the influence of epistemology on learning for a student in an introductory college physics course. An analysis of videotaped class work, written work, and interviews indicates that many of the student's…

Relating two quantities to describe a physical system or process is at the heart of "doing physics" for novices and experts alike. In this paper, we explore the ways in which experts use covariational reasoning when solving introductory…

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…

We report on a large-scale study of student learning of quantum tunneling in 4 traditional and 4 transformed modern physics courses. In the transformed courses, which were designed to address student difficulties found in previous research,…

Covariational reasoning -- reasoning about how changes in one quantity relate to changes in another quantity -- has been examined extensively in mathematics education research. Little research has been done, however, on covariational…

Integrating computation into physics teaching is a curricular move that, at present, has been predominately studied for its cognitive impacts. However, if this modality of instruction shifts how students engage with physics, we argue there…

First principles of electromagnetism impose that the tangential electric field must be continuous at the interface between two media. The definition of the electric field depends on the frame of reference leading to an ambiguity in the…

Compared with introductory physics, relatively little is known about the development of expertise in advanced physics courses, especially in the case of quantum mechanics. Here, we describe a framework for understanding the patterns of…

We describe an efficient and scalable spherical graph embedding method. The method uses a generalization of the Euclidean stress function for Multi-Dimensional Scaling adapted to spherical space, where geodesic pairwise distances are…

Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…

Students' difficulties in quantum mechanics may be the result of unproductive framing and not a fundamental inability to solve the problems or misconceptions about physics content. We observed groups of students solving quantum mechanics…

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…

Students must learn effective problem solving strategies in order to develop expertise in physics. Effective problem solving strategies include a conceptual analysis of the problem followed by planning of the solution, and then…

Scientific argumentation is a core science and engineering practice and a necessary 21st Century workforce skill. Due to the nature of large enrollment classes, it is difficult to individually assess students and provide feedback on their…

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…

Learning embedding spaces of suitable geometry is critical for representation learning. In order for learned representations to be effective and efficient, it is ideal that the geometric inductive bias aligns well with the underlying…