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Encouraging student engagement is a key aim in any educational setting, and allowing students the freedom to pursue their own methods of solving problems through independent experimentation has been shown to markedly improve this. In many…
Calls for reform to instructional labs means many instructors and departments are facing the daunting task of identifying goals for their introductory lab courses. Fortunately, the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) released a…
Data processing frameworks are an essential part of HEP experiments' software stacks. Frameworks provide a means by which code developers can undertake the essential tasks of physics data processing, accessing relevant inputs and storing…
I describe the assessment framework of labor-based contract grading (LBCG). In a labor-based grading scheme, the time and effort ("labor") a student spends on an assignment determines the credit they receive; the contract component requires…
Computational thinking has been a recent focus of education research within the sciences. However, there is a dearth of scholarly literature on how best to teach and to assess this topic, especially in disciplinary science courses. Physics…
Computer experiments refer to the study of real systems using complex simulation models. They have been widely used as alternatives to physical experiments. Design and analysis of computer experiments have attracted great attention in past…
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 article describes the reform of a physics undergraduate lab course by introducing new technologies such as Arduino microcontroller and smartphone, to help students experience a more authentic lab experience. This paper outlines the…
The importance of innovation in the world's economy, now undeniable, draws great attention to the need to improve organizations' creative potential. In the last 60 years, hundreds of books have been written on the subject and hundreds of…
A difficult challenge in physics education is to design professional development programs for teachers, which can lead to fundamental changes in their practise. We report all activities for physics teachers in the context of the National…
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…
Experiments require human decisions in the design process, which in turn are reformulated and summarized as inputs into a system (computational or otherwise) to generate the experimental design. I leverage this system to promote a language…
Project-based assessment, in the form of take-home exams, was trialed in an honours/masters level electromagnetic theory course. This assessment formed an integral part of the learning experience of the students, and students felt that this…
Professional development workshops are commonly used to promote the adoption of research-based instructional strategies among physics and astronomy faculty. After learning about such strategies, faculty are often motivated to modify and…
Increasing numbers of physicists engage in research activities that address biological questions from physics perspectives or strive to develop physics insights from active biological processes. The on-going development and success of such…
In experimental physics, lab notebooks play an essential role in the research process. For all of the ubiquity of lab notebooks, little formal attention has been paid to addressing what is considered `best practice' for scientific…
Laboratory courses are an important part of the undergraduate physics curriculum. During physics labs, students can engage in authentic, hands-on experimental practices, which can prepare them for graduate school, research laboratories, and…
We report a framework that enables the wide adoption of authentic research educational methodology at various schools by addressing common barriers. The guiding principles we present were applied to implement a program in which teams of…
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 prior work has shown that…
When deploying online homework in physics courses, an important consideration is how many attempts should be allowed in order to solve numerical free-response problems. While on the one hand, the maximum number of attempts should be large…