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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 studies suggest this…
Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to…
Consider the following story: A teacher announces to her students a test for the following week, such that the test will be ``surprising''. The students use this as the basis for a ``logical derivation'' and reach a contradiction, which…
Thermodynamics could be seen as an expression of physics at a high epistemic level. As such, its potential as an inductive bias to help machine learning procedures attain accurate and credible predictions has been recently realized in many…
When talking to secondary school students, first impressions are crucial. Accidentally say something that sounds boring and you'll lose them in seconds. A physical demonstration can be an eye-catching way to begin an activity or spark off a…
Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. When students encounter discrepancies between the actual and expected behavior of a system, they revise their models to include the newly…
A recent physics challenge shows a circuit, where a voltmeter is connected in series. Indeed, real voltmeters have finite input resistance, therefore one may think that they can be used as resistors. In addition, voltmeters measure the…
The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows, on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to understand…
Understanding instructor attitudes and approaches to teaching quantum mechanics can be helpful in developing research-based learning tools. Here we discuss the findings from a survey in which 13 instructors reflected on issues related to…
In order to study graduate teaching assistants (TAs) beliefs and values about the design of instructor problem solutions, twenty-four TAs were provided with different solutions and asked to discuss their preferences for prominent solution…
Sampling distribution, a foundational concept in statistics, is difficult to understand, since we usually have only one realization of the estimator of interest. In this work, we present an innovative method for helping university students…
Although interactive learning puts the user into the loop, the learner remains mostly a black box for the user. Understanding the reasons behind queries and predictions is important when assessing how the learner works and, in turn, trust.…
While it is well known which curricular practices can improve student performance on measures of conceptual understanding, the sustaining of these practices and the role of faculty members in implementing these practices are less well…
This article describes an undergraduate physics module at a university in England that places year 3 student physicists in secondary school classrooms for a semester. This is done as a way of introducing them to the occupation of secondary…
Many instructors choose to assess their students using open-ended written exam items that require students to show their understanding of physics by solving a problem and/or explaining a concept. Grading these items is fairly time…
The Teacher Assignment Problem is a combinatorial optimization problem that involves assigning teachers to courses while guaranteeing that all courses are covered, teachers do not teach too few or too many hours, teachers do not switch…
Analyzing students' written solutions to physics questions is a major area in PER. However, gauging student understanding in college courses is bottlenecked by large class sizes, which limits assessments to a multiple-choice (MC) format for…
Despite the extensive body of research that supports scientific inquiry and argumentation as cornerstones of physics learning, these strategies continue to be virtually absent in most classrooms, especially those that involve students who…
Solving exercise problems by yourself is a vital part of developing a mechanical understanding. Yet, most mechanics lectures have more than 200 participants, so the workload for manually creating and correcting assignments limits the number…
Learning assessments are subject of discussions that envolve theoretical and practical approaches. To measure learning in physics by high school students, either qualitatively or quantitatively, is a process in which it should be possible…