Related papers: Modern physics courses: Understanding the content …
Physical quantities and physical dimensions are among the first concepts encountered by students in their undergraduate career. In this pedagogical review, I will start from these concepts and, using the powerful tool of dimensional…
Analysis of institutional data for physics majors showing predictive relationships between required mathematics and physics courses in various years is important for contemplating how the courses build on each other and whether there is…
In the symposium contributions we discuss research in physics education and the consequences of its results for physics teaching. The symposium presents four different aspects of physics teaching and learning, but all of them have…
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…
Mathematics is a critical part of much scientific research. Physics in particular weaves math extensively into its instruction beginning in high school. Despite much research on the learning of both physics and math, the problem of how to…
Quantum computing harnesses quantum laws of nature to enable new types of algorithms, not efficiently possible on traditional computers, that may lead to breakthroughs in crucial areas like materials science and chemistry. There is rapidly…
The application of knowledge from quantum physics to computer science, which we call \doubleq{quantum informatics}, is driving the development of new technologies, such as quantum computing and quantum key distribution. Researchers in…
This paper re-centres the discussion of student learning in physics to focus on context. In order to do so, a theoretically-motivated understanding of context is developed. Given a well-defined notion of context, data from a novel…
Quantum physics is a linear theory, so it is somewhat puzzling that it can underlie very complex systems such as digital computers and life. This paper investigates how this is possible. Physically, such complex systems are necessarily…
Till now, the foundation of quantum physics is still mysterious. To explore the mysteries in the foundation of quantum physics, people always take it for granted that quantum processes must be some types of fields/objects on a rigid space.…
Quantum information is an emerging field which has attracted a lot of attention in the last fifteen years or so. It is a broad subject which covers from the most applied questions (e.g., how to build quantum computers or secure…
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…
We explore the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with non-relativistic quantum mechanics of a single particle in one spatial dimension. To investigate these difficulties we developed a conceptual survey and…
An important goal of graduate physics core courses is to help students develop expertise in problem solving and improve their reasoning and meta-cognitive skills. We explore the conceptual difficulties of physics graduate students by…
Studying for physics exams can be difficult and stressful, especially during a student's introductory year in physics. For students who do not plan to major in physics, the desire to do well is based less on understanding concepts and more…
Modern fundamental physics poses new questions for philosophy, which, as it seems to us, have not yet received appropriate attention from philosophers of science. This paper formulates a number of such questions in order to present them to…
Lecture script of a one-semester course that aims to develop an understanding and appreciation of fundemental concepts in modern physics for students who are comfortable with calculus. This document contains the first six lessons that will…
Quantum science is in the news daily and engages student interest and curiosity. A fundamental quantum science concept that underpins medical imaging, quantum computing and many future technologies is quantum spin. Quantum spin can explain…
The milq approach to quantum physics for high schools focuses on the conceptual questions of quantum physics. Students should be given the opportunity to engage with the world view of modern physics. The aim is to achieve a conceptually…
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…