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The gap between theory and practice is well-documented in educational research. Physics teachers' willingness to apply research findings in practice may be influenced by a sceptical attitude towards science education research. This study…
Helping students become proficient problem solvers is a major goal of many physics courses from introductory to advanced levels. In fact, physics has often been used by cognitive scientists to investigate the differences between the…
Mathematics is an essential element of physics problem solving, but experts often fail to appreciate exactly how they use it. Math may be the language of science, but math-in-physics is a distinct dialect of that language. Physicists tend…
At the intersection of what I call uncomputable art and computational epistemology, a form of experimental philosophy, we find an exciting and promising area of science related to causation with an alternative, possibly best possible,…
Computing education widely applies general learning theories and pedagogical practices. However, computing also includes specific disciplinary knowledge and skills, e.g., programming and software development methods, for which there has…
We are teachers who have benefited from the Open Source Physics (Brown, 2012; Christian, 2010; Esquembre, 2012) community's work and we would like to share some of the computer models and lesson packages that we have designed and…
With the increasing interplay between experimental and computational approaches at multiple length scales, new research directions are emerging in materials science and computational mechanics. Such cooperative interactions find many…
Even though there has been a tremendous amount of research done in how to help students learn physics, students are still coming away missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: why bother with physics? Students learn fundamental laws and how to…
In this article, the notion of a mathematical model in science is attempted to be enlightened from several points of view. In particular, it is shown that mathematical models are introduced differently and used differently in different…
Troubleshooting systems is integral to experimental physics in both research and instructional laboratory settings. The recently adopted AAPT Lab Guidelines identify troubleshooting as an important learning outcome of the undergraduate…
Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to…
In their study of physics beyond the first year of University -- termed upper-division in the US, many of students' primary learning opportunities come from working long, complex back-of-the-book style problems, and from trying to develop…
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…
Mathematics can serve many functions in physics. It can provide a computational system, reflect a physical idea, conveniently encode a rule, and so forth. A physics student thus has many different options for using mathematics in his…
Physics faculty care about their students learning physics content. In addition, they usually hope that their students will learn some deeper lessons about thinking critically and scientifically. They hope that as a result of taking a…
The intersection of physics and machine learning has given rise to the physics-enhanced machine learning (PEML) paradigm, aiming to improve the capabilities and reduce the individual shortcomings of data- or physics-only methods. In this…
Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) is becoming increasingly prevalent and capable in physics, particularly for programming-related tasks. How, then, does genAI affect students' computational modeling? We interviewed 19 undergraduate…
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…
Quantum Computing is an exciting field that draws from information theory, computer science, mathematics, and quantum physics to process information in fundamentally new ways. There is an ongoing race to develop practical quantum computers…
This second paper in a multi-part series builds on the first, which introduced the Ways of Thinking for Engineering Design-based Physics (WoT4EDP) framework for STEM education in an introductory undergraduate physics course. Here, we apply…