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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…
Learning to create, use, and evaluate models is a central element of becoming a scientist. In physics, we often begin an analysis of a complex system with highly simplified or toy models. In introductory physics classes, we tend to use them…
Uncertainty is an important and fundamental concept in physics education. Students are often first exposed to uncertainty in introductory labs, expand their knowledge across lab courses, and then are introduced to quantum mechanical…
Helping students learn to think like a physicist is an important goal of many introductory physics courses. One characteristic distinguishing more experienced physicists from novice students is that they make better use of problem solving…
A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in…
The importance of science beliefs such as self-efficacy, interest, identity, sense of belonging, perceived recognition and effectiveness of peer interaction in science education has been increasingly recognized in recent years. Here, we use…
Machine learning is increasingly transforming various scientific fields, enabled by advancements in computational power and access to large data sets from experiments and simulations. As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow in…
Despite nation efforts to promote diversity and inclusion, women and gender minorities remain underrepresented in physics. One common approach to studying gender in physics contexts treats gender as a categorical identity variable (e.g.…
Instructional physics labs are critical junctures for many STEM majors to develop an understanding of experimentation in the sciences. Students can acquire useful experimental skills and grow their identities as scientists. However, many…
Physics education researchers have argued that authentic physics education includes computation as part of a physics student's training, and many parties have made efforts towards this goal. However, most research on this teaching modality…
Too often, physics students are beset by feelings of failure and isolation rather than experiencing the creative joys of discovery that physics has to offer. This dissertation research was founded on the desire of a teacher to make physics…
A common learning goal for modern physics instructors is for students to recognize a difference between the experimental uncertainty of classical physics and the fundamental uncertainty of quantum mechanics. Our prior work has shown that…
Diversity has an important, multifaceted role in the success of education. I have used a corpus analysis of the first ten years of Physical Review Physics Education Research to investigate the diversity, broadly defined, of physics…
In experimental physics, lab notebooks play an essential role in the research process. For all of the ubiquity of lab notebooks, little formal attention has been paid to addressing what is considered `best practice' for scientific…
The use of lab notebooks for scientific documentation is a ubiquitous part of physics research. However, it is common for undergraduate physics laboratory courses not to emphasize the development of documentation skills, despite the fact…
Measurement uncertainty is a critical feature of experimental research in the physical sciences, and the concepts and practices surrounding measurement uncertainty are important components of physics lab courses. However, there has not been…
Increasingly, the physics community is attending to issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion, both in language and action. We are more publicly recognizing our individual responsibilities as physicists to address social injustice and…
Students often begin physics courses with misconceptions rooted in everyday experience and intuition, which can be resistant to change. While research has identified strategies for addressing misconceptions across physics, it remains…
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…
When considering performing an Introductory Physics for Life Sciences course transformation for one's own institution, life science majors' achievement goals are a necessary consideration to ensure the pedagogical transformation will be…