Related papers: Student understanding of electric and magnetic fie…
One area of physics education research has focused on the nature of ontologies (mental categorizations of concepts, substances and processes), and how they might be used to gain insight into student thinking when learning classical physics.…
The electric and magnetic polarizations as well as the electric and magnetic susceptibilities of the Hubbard pair-cluster embedded in the external fields were studied by the exact method. Based on the grand canonical ensemble for open…
The activation of scientific concepts (such as association) is not only an important way for children to organize scientific knowledges, but also an important way for them to learn complex concepts (such as compound concepts composed of…
Computational materials science increasingly benefits from data management, automation, and algorithm-based decision-making for the simulation of material properties and behavior. Experimental materials science also changes rapidly by…
This study investigates the representations and understandings of electric fields expressed by Chinese high school students 15 to 16 years old who have not received high school level physics instruction. The physics education research…
Self-organization of magnetic materials is an emerging and active field. An overview of the use of self-organization for magnetic purposes is given, with a view to illustrate aspects that cannot be covered by lithography. A first set of…
Research has linked a student's affect to her epistemology (Boaler & Greeno, 2000), but those constructs often apply broadly to a discipline and/or classroom culture. Independently, an emerging line of research shows that a student in a…
We investigate the dynamics of student behaviors (posture, gesture, vocal register, visual focus) and the substance of their reasoning during collaborative work on inquiry-based physics tutorials. Scherr has characterized student activity…
This paper describes results from a project in an undergraduate engineering physics course that coupled classroom use of interactive computer simulations with the collection of real-time formative assessment using pen-enabled mobile…
The cyclic format of the undergraduate physics curriculum depends on students' ability to recall and utilize material covered in prior courses in order to reliably build on that knowledge in later courses. However, there is evidence to…
The rapid advancement of technology and science education demands innovative approaches to develop students' critical and creative thinking skills. However, there is limited systematic evidence about the effectiveness of different physics…
In an Introductory Physics for Life Science (IPLS) course that leverages authentic biological examples, student ideas about entropy as "disorder" or "chaos" come into contact with their ideas about the spontaneous formation of organized…
Machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) are revolutionizing the field of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Recent MLIPs have tended towards more complex architectures trained on larger datasets. The resulting increase in…
Students express a wide range of preferences for learning environments. We are trying to measure the manifestation of learning styles in various learning environments. In particular, we are interested in performance in an environment that…
We assessed changes in calculus proficiency and calculus self-efficacy in a second semester course of introductory physics focused on electricity and magnetism. While all students demonstrated an increase in calculus proficiency, including…
We give a pedagogical introduction to two aspects of magnetic fields in the early universe. We first focus on how to formulate electrodynamics in curved space time, defining appropriate magnetic and electric fields and writing Maxwell…
While laboratory instruction is a cornerstone of physics education, the impact of student behaviours in labs on retention, persistence in the field, and the formation of students' physics identity remains an open question. In this study, we…
We discuss research involving the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) to evaluate one aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of teaching assistants (TAs): the knowledge of introductory students' alternate conceptions…
We have investigated the efficacy of online, multimedia learning modules (MLMs) as preparation for in-class, lecture-based tutorials in electromagnetism in a physics course for natural science majors (biology and marine science).…
As more and more face-to-face classes move to online environments, it becomes increasingly important to explore any emerging barriers to students' learning. This work focuses on characterizing student barriers to active learning in…