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The concepts of the Coriolis and the centrifugal force are essential in various scientific fields and they are standard components of introductory physics lectures. In this paper we explore how students understand and apply concepts of…
Students in introductory physics struggle with vector algebra and these challenges are often associated with contextual and representational features of the problems. Performance on problems about cross product direction is particularly…
Introductory courses on electric circuits at undergraduate level are usually presented in quite abstract terms, with questions and problems quite far from practical problems. This causes the students have difficulties to apply that theory…
We address previous hypotheses about possible factors influencing the gender gap in attainment in physics. Specifically, previous studies claim that male advantage may arise from multiple-choice style questions, and that scaffolding may…
We investigate upper-division student difficulties with direct integration in multiple contexts involving the calculation of a potential from a continuous distribution (e.g., mass, charge, or current). Integration is a tool that has been…
Undergraduate physics education has greatly benefited from the introduction of computational activities. However, despite the benefits computation has delivered, we still lack a complete understanding of the computationally integrated…
The Doppler effect has many applications in science and engineering fields. Although the format of the classical Doppler effect equation is simple, the derivation for the equation in physics textbooks is not intuitive to many students. This…
One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between the fundamental principles of classical physics and their personal experience. Nonetheless, numerous studies have shown…
Developing students' ability to troubleshoot is an important learning outcome for many undergraduate physics lab courses, especially electronics courses. In other work, metacognition has been identified as an important feature of…
The Hopfield model, originally inspired by spin-glass physics, occupies a central place at the intersection of statistical mechanics, neural networks, and modern artificial intelligence. Despite its conceptual simplicity and broad…
This article discusses how to make statistical graphics a more prominent element of the undergraduate statistics curricula. The focus is on several different types of assignments that exemplify how to incorporate graphics into a course in a…
Many well-known graph drawing techniques, including force directed drawings, spectral graph layouts, multidimensional scaling, and circle packings, have algebraic formulations. However, practical methods for producing such drawings…
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 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…
We present a thermodynamics experiment suitable for first year undergraduate students employing Stirling Engines to create a demonstration of energy transformation and to measure the mechanical efficiency of such engines. Using an…
The perspectives of introductory classical physics students can often negatively influence how those students later interpret quantum phenomena when taking an introductory course in modern physics. A detailed exploration of student…
Most introductory quantum physics instructors would agree that transitioning students from classical to quantum thinking is an important learning goal, but may disagree on whether or how this can be accomplished. Although (and perhaps…
The Modeling Instruction program at Arizona State University has developed a representational tool, called a system schema, to help students make a first level of abstraction of an actual physical situation [1]. A system schema consists of…
Effective physics learning, especially in complex topics, requires balancing mathematical formalism with conceptual understanding. Conceptual problem-solving involves connecting math to physical reality, and using an epistemological…
Representation learning on graphs has been gaining attention due to its wide applicability in predicting missing links, and classifying and recommending nodes. Most embedding methods aim to preserve certain properties of the original graph…