Related papers: Faculty survey on upper-division thermal physics c…
Thermal transport is a fundamental mechanism of energy transfer process quite distinct from wave propagation phenomena. It can be manipulated well beyond the possibilities offered by natural materials with a new generation of artificial…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly considered as tutoring aids in science education. Yet their readiness for unsupervised use in undergraduate instruction remains uncertain, as reliable teaching requires more than fluent recall:…
A central idea of knowledge distillation is to expose relational structure embedded in the teacher's weights for the student to learn, which is often facilitated using a temperature parameter. Despite its widespread use, there remains…
Physics Education Research (PER) practitioners have engaged in substantial curriculum development and dissemination work in recent years. Yet, it appears that this work has had minimal influence on the fundamental teaching practices of…
Laboratory courses for upper-division undergraduates often involve sophisticated equipment, relatively small class sizes, and extended hands-on projects. These courses present distinct challenges and opportunities for the physics education…
Modern cryopreservation exists at the convergence of diverse disciplines--materials science, physical chemistry, mechanical engineering, biological engineering, etc.--and emerging technologies often draw from many of these disciplines…
We report several simulation programs which can be used to teach the statistical foundation of thermal physics in the introductory college physics courses. These programs are simple applications of a technique of generating random…
Historically, physics has been a predominantly male field, with previous literature showing there is little diversity amongst U.S. physics students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Recent research indicates that the lack of…
To date, there is a lack of research on learning environments for pre-service physics teachers that allow them to learn and practise diagnosing students' conceptions that are (currently) not covered in physics education textbooks (e.g.…
The research presented in this thesis was motivated by the need to improve introductory physics courses. Introductory physics courses are generally the first courses in which students learn to create models to solve complex problems.…
A method to measure thermophysical characteristics (TPC) of conductive materials is described. The method is based upon controlled bulk (e.g., Ohmic) heating and measurement of the averaged over the volume of a sample temperature and the…
Thermal rectification which is a diode-like behavior of heat flux has been studied over a long time. However, a universal and systematic physical description is still lacking. In this letter, a perturbation theory of thermal rectification…
Students have several misconceptions about thermodynamics. However, an understanding of basic concepts in this branch of physics remains fundamental to explain thermal phenomena. The purpose of this activity was to extend students'…
Thermodynamics (in concert with its sister discipline, statistical physics) can be regarded as a data reduction scheme based on partitioning a total system into a subsystem and a bath that weakly interact with each other. The ubiquity and…
Analysis of institutional data for physics majors showing predictive relationships between required mathematics and physics courses in various years is important for contemplating how the courses build on each other and whether there is…
There are diverse teaching methodologies to promote both collaborative and individual work in undergraduate physics courses. However, few educational studies seek to understand how students learn and apply new knowledge through open-ended…
Providing students of introductory thermal physics with a plot of the heat capacities of many low density gases as a function of temperature allows them to look for systematic trends. Specifically, large amounts of heat capacity data allow…
Is physics education research based on a representative sample of students? To answer this question we skimmed physics education research papers from three journals for the years 1970 - 2015 looking for the number of research subjects, the…
These lecture notes, suitable for a two-semester introductory course or self-study, offer an elementary and self-contained exposition of the basic tools and concepts that are encountered in practical computations in perturbative thermal…
Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments…