Related papers: Development and Validation of a conceptual survey …
Thermal physics is a core course requirement for most physics degrees and encompasses both thermodynamics and statistical mechanics content. However, the primary content foci of thermal physics courses vary across universities. This…
Physics lab courses are an essential part of the physics undergraduate curriculum. Learning goals for these classes often include the ability to interpret measurements and uncertainties. The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) is an…
The objective of physics laboratory training is to develop, in students, a variety of important cognitive and psycho-motor abilities related to experimental physics. These include conceptual understanding, procedural understanding,…
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…
The Physics Inventory of Quantitative Literacy (PIQL), a reasoning inventory under development, aims to assess students' physics quantitative literacy at the introductory level. The PIQL's design presents the challenge of isolating types of…
The use of validated conceptual assessments alongside more standard course exams has become standard practice for the introductory courses in many physics departments. These assessments provide a more standard measure of certain learning…
Understanding concepts and practices of measurement uncertainty is a core competency of physicists and engineers, and many physics lab courses aim to have students learn these ideas. However, there is strong evidence that these goals are…
As part of ongoing investigations into student learning in advanced undergraduate courses, we have developed a conceptual assessment tool for upper-division electrodynamics (E&M II): the Colorado UppeR-division ElectrodyNamics Test…
This research investigate that science process skills significantly improve after doing some practicum activities. The research population are fifth semester physics education students and the research sample are fifth semester physics…
Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students'…
It is well-known that introductory physics students often have alternative conceptions that are inconsistent with established physical principles and concepts. Invoking alternative conceptions in quantitative problem-solving process can…
"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. We have been investigating the extent to which introductory…
We have designed an introductory laboratory course that engaged first-year undergraduate students in two complementary types of iteration: (1) iterative improvement of experiments through cycles of modeling systems, designing experiments,…
This work frames the first three publications around the development of the Flight Physics Concept Inventory (FliP-CoIn), and elaborates on many aspects in more detail. FliP-CoIn is a multiple-choice conceptual assessment instrument for…
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…
Scientific argumentation is a core science and engineering practice and a necessary 21st Century workforce skill. Due to the nature of large enrollment classes, it is difficult to individually assess students and provide feedback on their…
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…
Research-validated multiple-choice questions comprise an easy-to-implement instructional tool that serves to scaffold student learning and formatively assess students knowledge. We present findings from the implementation, in consecutive…
Student learning in instructional physics labs represents a growing area of research that includes investigations of students' beliefs and expectations about the nature of experimental physics. To directly probe students' epistemologies…
This article describes a curricular innovation designed to help students experience authentic physics inquiry with an emphasis on computational modeling and scientific communication. The educational design centers on a new type of…