Related papers: Student difficulties in translating between mathem…
Molecules have seemed like a natural fit to deep learning's tendency to handle a complex structure through representation learning, given enough data. However, this often continuous representation is not natural for understanding chemical…
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…
Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments…
Incorporating computer programming exercises into introductory physics is a delicate task that involves a number of choices that may have an effect on student learning. We present a "hybrid" approach that speaks to a number of common…
We discuss an investigation exploring students' difficulties with equations involving resistance, capacitance and inductance. We find that introductory physics students have great difficulty understanding, e.g., how the resistance of an…
We describe how graduate students categorize introductory mechanics problems based on the similarity of their solutions. Graduate students were asked at the end of a teaching assistant training class to categorize problems from their own…
Students' difficulties in quantum mechanics may be the result of unproductive framing rather than a fundamental inability to solve the problems or misconceptions about physics content. Using the theoretical lens of epistemological framing,…
Textbooks play a fundamental role in teaching and learning in school science classrooms. In this paper we investigate the presentation of the nature of the electromagnetic field in a dozen of the world's most popular introductory university…
We outline an unified introduction to the evolution equations of classical and quantum systems intended for a high school students audience. The attempt consists in circumventing the lack of mathematical knowledge with the use of simplified…
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…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
Students in introductory calculus-based physics not only have difficulty understanding the fundamental physical concepts, they often have difficulty relating those concepts to the mathematics they have learned in math courses. This produces…
In this paper, we advocate a novel spline-based isogeometric approach for boundary elements and its efficient implementation. We compare solutions obtained by both an isogeometric approach, and a classical parametric higher-order approach…
With inspiration from the classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser [1], we asked introductory physics students in three introductory physics classes to categorize mechanics problems based upon similarity of solutions. To evaluate the…
It is becoming common to hear teaching advice about spending more time on the "physics of the problem" so that students will get more physical insight and develop a stronger intuition that can be very helpful when thinking about physics…
The impact of inquiry-based instruction on the improvement of content knowledge of electricity and wave properties in two studies was the subject of this investigation. Groups of pre-college and undergraduate students performed a series of…
In a lesson on holography a tension is to be found between the ray model, the wave model, the phasor model and the particle model. Lessons depend on the previous experiences of the students, the intentions of the teacher as well as on other…
This exploratory field study investigates the integration of innovative forms of recitation tasks in a first-year introductory mechanics course, focusing on smartphone-based experimental tasks alongside programming and standard recitation…
Holography as a subject is neglected largely in current physics lessons and in school books. Even though this topic might be complex, it is applicable and viable in the world that we live in. Holography lends itself to further develop…
An important goal of graduate physics core courses is to help students develop expertise in problem solving and improve their reasoning and meta-cognitive skills. We explore the conceptual difficulties of physics graduate students by…