Related papers: Surveying Graduate Students' Attitudes and Approac…
Formally investigating the sources of students' difficulties around specific subjects is crucial for developing appropriate strategies to help students. We have been studying difficulties in understanding magnetism encountered by students…
As research-based self-paced e-learning tools become increasingly available, a critical issue educators encounter is implementing strategies to ensure that all students engage with them as intended. Here, we discuss the effectiveness of…
With an investigation into how students in a physics Master of science program make sense of their whole first year study experience in one of the years following a programme reform, we try to offer insights and advice to consider when…
Student learning in undergraduate physics laboratory courses has garnered increased attention within the PER community. Considerable work has been done to develop curricular materials and pedagogical techniques designed to enhance student…
This study aimed at evaluating how students perceive the linguistic quality and scientific accuracy of ChatGPT responses to physics comprehension questions. A total of 102 first- and second-year physics students were confronted with three…
The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to…
Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students'…
A large body of research shows that using interactive engagement pedagogy in the introductory physics classroom consistently results in significant student learning gains; however, with a few exceptions, those learning gains tend not to be…
Joining a research group is one of the most important events on a graduate student's path to earning a PhD, but the ways students go about searching for a group remain largely unstudied. It is therefore crucial to investigate whether…
Six specific modes of reasoning about ratio and proportion have been delineated as a means of operationalizing expert practice. These modes stem from consideration of how physicists reason in context, are informed by prior work in physics…
Problem solving is an integral part of any physics curriculum, and most physics instructors would likely agree that the associated learner competencies are best assessed by considering the solution path: not only the final solution matters,…
Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to…
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…
Understanding instructor attitudes and approaches to teaching quantum mechanics can be helpful in developing research-based learning tools. Here we discuss the findings from a survey in which 13 instructors reflected on issues related to…
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…
Prior research has shown that physics students often think about experimental procedures and data analysis very differently from experts. One key framework for analyzing student thinking has found that student thinking is more point-like,…
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…
Learning physics requires understanding the applicability of fundamental principles in a variety of contexts that share deep features. One way to help students learn physics is via analogical reasoning. Students can be taught to make an…
We discuss the development, implementation, and assessment of a course for science undergraduates designed to help them develop an awareness and a deeper appreciation of the intellectual demands of physics teaching. The course focused on…
The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a multiple-choice survey that contains a variety of electricity and magnetism concepts from Coulomb's law to Faraday's law at the level of introductory physics used to help inform…