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Memory effects are ubiquitous in nature and are particularly relevant at the nanoscale where the dynamical properties of electrons and ions strongly depend on the history of the system, at least within certain time scales. We review here…

Anyone who looks into the circuitry world will be familiar with the three fundamental circuit elements - capacitor, resistor, and inductor. These circuit elements are defined by the relation between two of the four fundamental circuit…

Drawable electronics attract the attention of both educators and innovative circuit engineers due to their affordability and simplicity. This paper focuses on active learning activities related to conducting lines and presents extensible…

Measurement uncertainty plays a critical role in the process of experimental physics. It is useful to be able to assess student proficiency around the topic to iteratively improve instruction and student learning. For the topic of…

This tutorial article presents a "bottom-up" view of electrical resistance starting from something really small, like a molecule, and then discussing the issues that arises as we move to bigger conductors. Remarkably, no serious quantum…

Researchers have pinpointed recognition from others as one of the most important dimensions of students' science and engineering identity. Studies, however, have found gender biases in students' recognition of their peers, with inconsistent…

The physics community explores and explains the physical world through a blend of theoretical and experimental studies. The future of physics as a discipline depends on training of students in both the theoretical and experimental aspects…

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…

Developing expertise in physics requires appropriate integration and assimilation of physics and mathematics. Instructors and students often describe physics courses in terms of their emphasis on conceptual and quantitative problem-solving.…

The process of constructing knowledge is typically taught to students by having them reproduce established results (e.g., homework problems). An alternative pedagogical strategy is to illustrate this process using an open problem, such as…

The decay of the electrical energy in a resistor-vacuum capacitor circuit is shown to involve multiple relaxation processes, with dramatically different time constants. This is measured using a vacuum capacitor to eliminate the effect of a…

Investigations related to expertise in problem solving and ability to transfer learning from one context to another are important for developing strategies to help students perform more expert-like tasks. Here we analyze written responses…

Sliding friction is usually introduced in high school, but rarely through activities in laboratory. A qualitative introduction to friction is presented by proposing exploration of different kind of materials in order to suggest which…

It is well-known that introductory physics students often have alternative conceptions that are inconsistent with established physical principles and concepts. Invoking alternative conceptions in quantitative problem-solving process can…

An important step in learning to use math in science is learning to see physics equations as not just calculational tools, but as ways of expressing fundamental relationships among physical quantities, of coding conceptual information, and…

In heterogeneous system, the correspondence between calculated and measured quantities, such as the conductivity or the resistivity, is not obvious since the former ones are local quantities whereas the latter ones are often average values…

Learning physics is a context dependent process. I consider a broader interdisciplinary problem of where differences in understanding and reasoning arise. I suggest the long run effects a multiple choice based learning system as well as…

Just as expert physicists vary in their personal stances on interpretation in quantum mechanics, instructors vary on whether and how to teach interpretations of quantum phenomena in introductory modern physics courses. In this paper, we…

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…

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…