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This study investigates the impact of educational comics as an active learning strategy in physics workshops for undergraduate students in Chemistry and Pharmacy and Biochemistry during the second semester of 2025. Conceptual understanding…
We describe how graduate students categorize introductory mechanics problems based on the similarity of their solutions. Graduate students were asked at the end of a teaching assistant training class to categorize problems from their own…
Studies indicate that pre-existing misconceptions negatively impact the effectiveness of traditional physics education. Research has also shown that activity based instruction improves posttest scores on conceptual evaluations. However, the…
As part of a larger research project into massively open online courses (MOOCs), we have investigated student background, as well as student participation in a physics MOOC with a laboratory component. Students completed a demographic…
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…
Generative AI technologies such as large language models show novel potentials to enhance educational research. For example, generative large language models were shown to be capable to solve quantitative reasoning tasks in physics and…
Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students' knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks (the "ConMap" tasks) was developed to probe the…
The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a multiple-choice survey that contains a variety of electricity and magnetism concepts from Coulomb's law to Faraday's law at the level of introductory physics used to help inform…
Conceptual inventory surveys are routinely used in education research to identify student learning needs and assess instructional practices. Students might not fully engage with these instruments because of the low stakes attached to them.…
The current work aims to better understand student course experiences for those who reported negative perceptions in introductory physics. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 students who reported negative perceptions of their…
There is a substantial curricular overlap between calculus and physics, yet introductory physics students often struggle to connect the two. We introduce a quantity-based framing of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (FTC) to help unify…
A key to effective teaching is an awareness and accurate understanding of the thinking and implicit assumptions that students bring to the subject to be learned. In the absence of extensive Socratic interactions with students, one strategy…
Research-based assessment instruments (RBAIs) are ubiquitous throughout both physics instruction and physics education research. The vast majority of analyses involving student responses to RBAI questions have focused on whether or not a…
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…
Developing expertise in physics requires appropriate integration and assimilation of physics and mathematics. Instructors and students often describe physics courses in terms of their emphasis on conceptual and quantitative problem-solving.…
With inspiration from the classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser [1], we asked introductory physics students in three introductory physics classes to categorize mechanics problems based upon similarity of solutions. To evaluate the…
An essential step in the process of developing a physics identity is the opportunity to engage in authentic physics practices - an ideal place to gain these experiences is physics laboratory courses. We are designing a practice-based…
We examine the difficulties that introductory physics students, undergraduate physics majors, and physics graduate students have with concepts related to conductors and insulators covered in introductory physics by giving written tests and…
We present results of a combined study from three UK universities where we investigate the existence and persistence of a performance gender gap in conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics. Using the Force Concept Inventory, we find…
This article discusses a three-year study (2020 - 2022) of dominant misconceptions (DMs) for a large cohort of first-year physics course students at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), South Africa. Our study considered pre-test scores on…