Related papers: Improving Student Understanding of Magnetism
To make physics experiments more directly relevant to everyday life and help students realize how their smart phones or tablets can be used as sensors for scientific measurements, we designed two introductory physics experiments to measure…
Quantum mechanics is a field often considered very mathematical, abstract, and unintuitive. One way some instructors are hoping to help familiarize their students with these complex topics is to have the students see quantum effects in…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
A typical introductory treatment of electromagnetism culminates with the investigation of Maxwell's equations, showing the beautiful connection between the concepts covered in the many prior weeks. The lab described here is an experimental…
We investigated students' use of Newton's second law in mechanics and electromagnetism contexts by interviewing students in a two-semester calculus-based physics course. We observed that students' responses are consistent with three mental…
Uncertainty is an important concept in physics laboratory instruction. However, little work has examined how students reason about uncertainty beyond the introductory (intro) level. In this work we aimed to compare intro and beyond-intro…
Integrating areas of current research into undergraduate physics labs can be a difficult task. The location of the magnetopause is one problem that can be examined with no prior exposure to space physics. The magnetopause location can be…
Students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can profoundly influence their motivation to learn and development of expertise. We developed and validated an Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving survey by expanding…
A combination of observation, theory, modeling, and laboratory plasma experiments provides a multifaceted approach to develop a much greater understanding of how magnetic fields arise in galactic settings and how these magnetic fields…
The combination of theory and simulation is necessary in the investigation of properties of complex systems where each method alone cannot do the task properly. Theory needs simulation to test ideas and to check approximations. Simulation…
A vast scientific literature in physics education documents a general widespread difficulty in dealing with Electro-Magnetic Induction (EMI) at various levels of instruction. But, at the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of research…
We examine the difficulties that introductory physics students, undergraduate physics majors, and physics graduate students have with concepts related to conductors and insulators covered in introductory physics by giving written tests and…
A close look at students' written work on examinations offers a wealth of information about their performance, their knowledge of the subject, their strengths, weaknesses and misconceptions, and their overall level of mathematical skills…
Quantum information science and technology is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field drawing researchers from science and engineering fields. Traditional instruction in quantum mechanics is insufficient to prepare students for research…
In the symposium contributions we discuss research in physics education and the consequences of its results for physics teaching. The symposium presents four different aspects of physics teaching and learning, but all of them have…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
The lack of diversity and the under-performance of underrepresented students in STEM courses have been the focus of researchers in the last decade. In particular, many hypotheses have been put forth for the reasons for the…
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…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than contexts, is considered a hallmark of expertise in physics problem solving. With inspiration from a classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, we compared…
We investigated the effects of student-generated problems on exams. The process was gradual with some training throughout the semester. Initial results were highly positive with the students involved performing significantly better, and…