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Students are taught several models of conductivity, both at the introductory and the advanced level. From early macroscopic models of current flow in circuits, through the discussion of microscopic particle descriptions of electrons flowing…
We investigated the common difficulties that students have with concepts related to rotational and rolling motion covered in the introductory physics courses. We compared the performance of calculus- and algebra-based introductory physics…
Measurement uncertainty is an important topic in the undergraduate laboratory curriculum. Previous research on student thinking about experimental measurement uncertainty has focused primarily on introductory-level students' procedural…
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…
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…
We investigate learning difficulties among second-year students on electromagnetism courses when they apply Amp\`ere-Maxwell's law. Using phenomenography, we analysed written answers from 65 undergraduate physics students to four questions…
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…
How students use mathematics in their physics classes has been studied extensively in the physics education literature. In addition to specific mathematical methods in specific physics contexts, possible effects of more general "cultural"…
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…
We discuss the clusters of resources that emerge when upper-division students write about electromagnetic fields in linear materials. The data analyzed for this paper comes from students' written tests in an upper-division electricity and…
The magnetic field is traditionally presented as a (pseudo)vector quantity, tied closely to the cross product. Though familiar to experts, many students find these ideas challenging and full of subtleties. Building on earlier work in…
Students entering engineering in universities of applied sciences were tested to see whether they understood easy Science problems within the first week of the first semester. The test comprised of mathematics and physics questions in both…
Measurement uncertainty and experimental error are important concepts taught in undergraduate physics laboratories. Although student ideas about error and uncertainty in introductory classical mechanics lab experiments have been studied…
Instruction in quantum mechanics is becoming increasingly important as the field is not only a key part of modern physics research, but is also important for emerging technologies. However, many students regard quantum mechanics as a…
The aim of this study is to investigate the decisions and reasoning of undergraduate students when choosing simple measurement instruments in an introductory physics laboratory course. For this study, we have developed a questionnaire and…
The perspectives of introductory classical physics students can often negatively influence how those students later interpret quantum phenomena when taking an introductory course in modern physics. A detailed exploration of student…
The Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey (EMCS) is a multiple-choice survey that contains conceptual problems involving a variety of energy and momentum concepts covered in a typical introductory physics course for science and engineering…
Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students' knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks (the "ConMap" tasks) was developed to probe the…
Electromagnetism, being much less intuitive than mechanics, where a lot of sources of misconceptions have been documented, has in addition to the common sources of misconceptions borrowed from mechanics other sources related to the abstract…
Physics is considered as one of the most prevailing and problematic subjects by the students in the realm of science. Students perceived physics as a difficult subject during high school days and become more evasive when they reach college.…