Related papers: Designing Experiments: Student Learning Experience…
Physics Education Research (PER) is a global endeavour, with a wealth of work performed at a variety of institutions worldwide. However, results from research into undergraduate physics laboratory courses is often difficult to compare due…
Reproducibility should be a cornerstone of scientific research and is a growing concern among the scientific community and the public. Understanding how to design services and tools that support documentation, preservation and sharing is…
Studying for physics exams can be difficult and stressful, especially during a student's introductory year in physics. For students who do not plan to major in physics, the desire to do well is based less on understanding concepts and more…
Developing students' ability to troubleshoot is an important learning outcome for many undergraduate physics lab courses, especially electronics courses. In other work, metacognition has been identified as an important feature of…
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…
Despite the large body of research showing that students in STEM classes at all levels learn better via active learning than they do via lecture, post-secondary physics and astronomy (P&A) faculty members continue to primarily use…
"Self-diagnosis tasks" aim at fostering diagnostic behavior by explicitly requiring students to present diagnosis as part of the activity of reviewing their problem solutions. The recitation classes in an introductory physics class (~200…
Despite the precision and adaptiveness of generative AI (GAI)-powered feedback provided to students, existing practice and literature might ignore how usage patterns impact student learning. This study examines the heterogeneous effects of…
In response to national calls to better align physics laboratory courses with the way physicists engage in research, we have developed an epistemology and expectations survey to assess how students perceive the nature of physics experiments…
In many upper-division lab courses, instructors implement multiweek student-led projects. During such projects, students may design and carry out experiments, collect and analyze data, document and report their findings, and collaborate…
Computation is becoming an increasingly important part of physics education. However, there are currently few theories of learning that can be used to help explain and predict the unique challenges and affordances associated with…
Identifying the relevant physics principles is a central component of problem solving. A major goal of most introductory physics courses is to help students discern the deep similarities between problems based upon the physics principles so…
The impact of inquiry-based instruction on the improvement of content knowledge of electricity and wave properties in two studies was the subject of this investigation. Groups of pre-college and undergraduate students performed a series of…
What if we take a broader view of what it means to run an education experiment? In this paper, we explore opportunities that arise when we think beyond the commonly-held notion that the purpose of an experiment is to either accept or reject…
The ASK-IT/Assessing-to-Learn (A2L) project is an attempt to bring a strategic approach to learning, instruction, and communication. ASK-IT/A2L seeks to integrate formative assessment and classroom response system use with physics…
Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and framing. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for…
The American Physical Society recently released a statement calling on all university physics departments to provide or facilitate access to research experiences for all undergraduate students. In response, we investigated the current…
The authors use an action research (AR) approach in a collegiate studio physics class to investigate the power of partnerships via conferences as they relate to issues of establishing a student/mentor rapport, empowering students to reduce…
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"…
Multiweek projects in physics labs can engage students in authentic experimentation practices, and it is important to understand student experiences during projects along multiple dimensions. To this end, we conducted an exploratory…