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We present two programs that address needs to better prepare graduate students for their roles as professional physicists, particularly in the areas of teaching and education research. The two programs, Preparing Future Physicists (PFP) and…
An appropriate diagram is a required element of a solution building process in physics problem solving and it can transform a given problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving the problem. A major focus while helping…
These notes were compiled as lecture notes for a course developed and taught at the University of the Southern California. They should be accessible to a typical engineering graduate student with a strong background in Applied Mathematics.…
This essay discusses the effectiveness of a graduate course for physics students, with a course goal to write a publishable article on a modern research topic (graphene). I analyze the tools used to this end, which included Web 2.0 methods,…
The ubiquity of technology in our daily lives and the economic stability of the technology sector in recent years, especially in areas with a computer science footing, has led to an increase in computer science enrollment in many parts of…
We discuss the categorization of 20 quantum mechanics problems by physics professors and undergraduate students from two honors-level quantum mechanics courses. Professors and students were asked to categorize the problems based upon…
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…
In this work, we develop statistical tools to understand core courses at the university level. Traditionally, professors and administrators label courses as "core" when the courses contain foundational material. Such courses are often…
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…
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…
Recruiting and retaining highly qualified physics and physical science teachers is critical for maintaining America's global competitiveness. Unfortunately, only one third of the high school teachers in physics have a degree in physics and…
Very little is known about how the nature of expertise in introductory and advanced courses compares in knowledge-rich domains such as physics. We develop a framework to compare the similarities and differences between learning and patterns…
As part of a larger study to understand instructors' considerations regarding the learning and teaching of problem solving in an introductory physics course, we investigated beliefs of first-year graduate teaching assistants (TAs) regarding…
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…
Physics Education Research frequently investigates what students studying physics do on small time scales (e.g. single courses, observations within single courses), or post-education time scales (e.g., what jobs do physics majors get?) but…
Science communication skills are considered essential learning objectives for undergraduate physics students. However, high enrollment and limited class resources present significant barriers to providing students ample opportunities to…
We introduce PHYSICS, a comprehensive benchmark for university-level physics problem solving. It contains 1297 expert-annotated problems covering six core areas: classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical…
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…
Computation has become an integral part of physics research. However, little is known about how students learn to productively use computation as a tool beyond the introductory level, especially as they transition into physics research. In…
Instructors in introductory physics courses often use labs and demonstrations to reinforce that the physics equations introduced in lectures and textbooks describe what actually happens in the real world. The surface features and…