Related papers: Investigating how students collaborate to generate…

A primary goal of physics is to create mathematical models that allow both predictions and explanations of physical phenomena. We weave maths extensively into our physics instruction beginning in high school, and the level and complexity of…

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…

Teaching physics in real-life contexts continues to be a challenge for teachers at different educational levels. In this article, three Context-Rich Problems are proposed to be implemented in the classroom for higher education, using the…

The core of scientific research is turning new ideas into reality. From the school science fair to the search for the secrets of dark energy, high-quality research consists of scientific investigation constrained within the scope of a…

In response to an invitation to integrate science and art pedagogy, science and dance students, enrolled in specific discipline courses, collaboratively produced choreography based on scientific principles. This paper reports students…

This paper describes a collaboration between a mathematician and a compositionist who developed a sequence of collaborative writing assignments for calculus. This sequence of developmentally-appropriate assignments presents peer review as a…

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) increase students' access to research. This lesson plan describes an interdisciplinary CURE developed to be able to involve over 60 students per semester in original research using…

In this companion paper, we explore the use of isomorphic problem pairs (IPPs) to assess introductory physics students' ability to solve and successfully transfer problem-solving knowledge from one context to another in mechanics. We call…

To effectively prepare engineering students requires of formation of a system of fundamental physical knowledge together with the ability to apply them in specific productive activities, both on fundamental and on the profiled-oriented…

The ability to categorize problems is a measure of expertise in a domain. In order to help students learn effectively, instructors and teaching assistants (TAs) should have pedagogical content knowledge. They must be aware of the prior…

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…

With the adoption of instructional laboratories (labs) that require students to make their own decisions, there is a need to better understand students' activities as they make sense of their data and decide how to proceed. In particular,…

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…

In this study, we examine introductory physics students' ability to perform analogical reasoning between two isomorphic problems which employ the same underlying physics principles but have different surface features. Three hundred and…

Drawing on the Data and Predictions strand of the Indicazioni Nazionali per il curricolo 2012, this study proposes a problem based instructional approach to the teaching of probability. More specifically, the study adopts a design based…

While lab courses are an integral part of studying physics aiming at a huge variety of learning objectives, research has shown that typical lab courses do not reach all the desired goals. While diverse approaches by lab instructors and…

Investigations related to expertise in problem solving and ability to transfer learning from one context to another are important for developing strategies to help students perform more expert-like tasks. Here we analyze written responses…

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 mindset literature is a longstanding area of psychological research focused on beliefs about intelligence, response to challenge, and goals for learning (Dweck, 2000). However, the mindset literature's applicability to the context of…

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is a fundamental practice in middle-school mathematics education; however, student groups frequently stall or struggle without ongoing teacher support. Recent work has explored how Generative AI tools can…