Related papers: Teaching Physics in the Woods
Traditional high-stakes summative assessments--timed, in-class exams accounting for a large percentage of the term's overall grade--have often received criticism from the educational community. Such assessments tend to prize a particular…
Almost all theories of physics have expressed physical laws by means of differential equations. One can ask: why differential equations? What is special about them? This article addresses these questions and is presented as an inquiry-based…
A workshop using dance to introduce particle physics concepts to young children is presented. The workshop is realised in the dance studio, the children assume complete ownership of the activity and dance becomes the means to express ideas.…
Many Physics Education Researchers have discussed the positive correlation between students' incoming mathematics skills and performance in their physics classes. Thus, in order to strengthen their performance gains in their physics…
Recent decades have seen a rise in the use of physics methods to study different societal phenomena. This development has been due to physicists venturing outside of their traditional domains of interest, but also due to scientists from…
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…
The reform of the upper secondary school in Italy has recently introduced physics in the curricula of professional schools, in realities where it was previously absent. Many teachers, often with a temporary position, are obliged to teaching…
English Language Learners (ELLs) are frequently left on the periphery of classroom interactions. Due to misalignment of language skills, teachers and peers communicate with these students less often, decreasing the number of opportunities…
Scientific communication inside and outside the classroom is the main means for providing an adequate understanding of how science and technological innovation relate to society. In order to achieve this goal, it is important to explore new…
One of key goals of contemporary physics (and, realistically, STEM) education is to develop students' science literacy and critical thinking skills. In this paper, we present the construction and use of several versions of a simple…
At many physics departments a significant fraction of teaching is in support of engineers and scientists in other majors. These service courses are thus an automatic crucible of interdisciplinary interaction, and at times, strife. For…
Science education at all levels is currently undergoing dramatic changes to its curricula and developing assessments for these new curricula is paramount. We have used the basis of many of these new changes (scientific practices,…
Diversity has an important, multifaceted role in the success of education. I have used a corpus analysis of the first ten years of Physical Review Physics Education Research to investigate the diversity, broadly defined, of physics…
As the frontiers of biology become increasingly interdisciplinary, the physics education community has engaged in ongoing efforts to make physics classes more relevant to life sciences majors. These efforts are complicated by the many…
The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to…
Modern physics is now a regular course for non-physics majors who do not have to take the accompanying laboratory. This lack of an experimental component puts the engineering students at a disadvantage. A possible solution is the use of…
As 2005, the International Year of Physics, comes to an end, two physicists working primarily in geophysical research reflect on how geophysics is not an applied physics. Although geophysics has certainly benefited from progress in physics…
Distance education has expanded significantly over the last decade, but the natural sciences have lagged in the implementation of this instructional mode. The abrupt onset of the COVID-19 pandemic left educational institutions scrambling to…
We report results from a study designed to identify links between undergraduate students' views about experimental physics and their engagement in multiweek projects in lab courses. Using surveys and interviews, we explored whether students…
The development of a workshop using the language, techniques, and processes of visual art to introduce particle physics concepts is described. Innovative delivery methods committed to the interaction and collaboration of different…