Related papers: Lessons for instructor-student interactions in phy…
We present two programs that address needs to better prepare graduate students for their roles as professional physicists, particularly in the areas of teaching and education research. The two programs, Preparing Future Physicists (PFP) and…
Successful teaching entails a complex interaction between a teacher and a learner. The teacher must select and convey information based on what they think the learner perceives and believes. Teaching always involves misaligned beliefs, but…
This study investigates a group of high school students in a physics classroom interacting with a computer simulation that simulates the electrostatic interaction as a hockey game, the Electric Field Hockey. The activity featured in this…
Investigations related to expertise in problem solving and ability to transfer learning from one context to another are important for developing strategies to help students perform more expert-like tasks. Here we analyze written responses…
Many undergraduate and graduate physics students participate in some form of public engagement throughout the course of their studies, often through groups supported by physics departments and universities. These informal teaching and…
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…
Physical learning is an emerging paradigm in science and engineering whereby (meta)materials acquire desired macroscopic behaviors by exposure to examples. So far, it has been applied to static properties such as elastic moduli and…
Physics education research has probed for the relevance of physics in students' everyday lives. Attitudinal and epistemological surveys have asked students if they think of or use physics in their daily lives. We have previously documented…
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.…
Purpose: The teacher role in the classroom can explain important aspects of the student's school experience. The teacher-student relationship, a central dimension of social capital, influences students' engagement, and the teaching style…
We discuss the development of interactive video tutorial-based problems to help introductory physics students learn effective problem solving heuristics. The video tutorials present problem solving strategies using concrete examples in an…
Movement-sound interactive systems are at the interface of different artistic and educational practices. Within this multiplicity of uses, we examine common denominators in terms of learning, appropriation and relationship to technological…
Dynamical systems across many disciplines are modeled as interacting particles or agents, with interaction rules that depend on a very small number of variables (e.g. pairwise distances, pairwise differences of phases, etc...), functions of…
Projects and Practices in Physics (P$^3$) is an introductory physics class at Michigan State University that replaces lectures with a problem based learning environment. To promote the development of group based practices, students all…
Recruiting and retaining highly qualified physics and physical science teachers is critical for maintaining America's global competitiveness. Unfortunately, only one third of the high school teachers in physics have a degree in physics and…
This paper makes a first step towards a logic of learning from experiments. For this, we investigate formal frameworks for modeling the interaction of causal and (qualitative) epistemic reasoning. Crucial for our approach is the idea that…
Conversation is like an intricate partner dance and behavioral convergence, or the similarity in observable behaviors of partners over time, can lead to shared understanding, changed beliefs and increased rapport. This article describes a…
Students who serve as Learning Assistants (LAs) and have the opportunity to teach the content they are learning, while also studying effective teaching pedagogy, have demonstrated achievement gains in advanced content courses and positive…
The traditional pedagogical paradigm in physics is based on a deductive approach. However, with the recent advances in information technology, we are facing a dramatic increase in the amount of readily available information; hence, the…
There is some evidence that conceptual inquiry-based introductory physics lab curricula, such as RealTime Physics, may improve students' understanding of physics concepts. Thus, these curricula may be attractive for instructors who seek to…