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We examine the effect of misconceptions about friction on students' ability to solve problems and transfer from one context to another. We analyze written responses to paired isomorphic problems given to introductory physics students and…
Students entering engineering in universities of applied sciences were tested to see whether they understood easy Science problems within the first week of the first semester. The test comprised of mathematics and physics questions in both…
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…
We believe that economists have much to learn from educational research practices and related pedagogical innovations in other disciplines, in particular physics education. In this paper we identify three key features of physics education…
An important, yet largely unstudied, problem in student data analysis is to detect misconceptions from students' responses to open-response questions. Misconception detection enables instructors to deliver more targeted feedback on the…
Uncertainty is an important and fundamental concept in physics education. Students are often first exposed to uncertainty in introductory labs, expand their knowledge across lab courses, and then are introduced to quantum mechanical…
The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows, on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to understand…
We address the question "How do students make sense of Physics from the point of view of constituting physics knowledge?". A phenomenographic study is described as a result of which we present six qualitatively different ways in which…
Measurement uncertainty plays a critical role in the process of experimental physics. It is useful to be able to assess student proficiency around the topic to iteratively improve instruction and student learning. For the topic 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 studies suggest this…
We investigated physics students' learning experience and behaviour in a second-year laboratory by analyzing transcribed audio recordings of laboratory sessions. One student group was given both a problem and procedure and asked to analyze…
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…
Problem solving is central to physics instruction. Results from Physics Education Research (PER), however, demonstrate that traditional ways of teaching with problem solving are inefficient and ineffective for promoting true physics…
Helping students learn from their own mistakes can help them develop habits of mind while learning physics content. Based upon cognitive apprenticeship model, we asked students to self-diagnose their mistakes and learn from reflecting on…
To help faculty use research-based materials in a more significant way, we learn about their perceived needs and desires and use this information to suggest ways for the Physics Education Research community to address these needs. When…
Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students' knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks (the "ConMap" tasks) was developed to probe the…
The current work aims to better understand student course experiences for those who reported negative perceptions in introductory physics. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 students who reported negative perceptions of their…
Embedding physics problems unreal-world settings, here termed contextualized physics problems (CPP), is widely believed to foster students' interest, motivation, and learning. However, firm evidence for this claim remains scarce. To explore…
This is a report on a qualitative study of students' learning where a physics computer simulation session is used to supplement lectures on the topic. Drawing on phenomenography as the analytical framework, the students' learning-focuses…
Helping students learn to think like a physicist is an important goal of many introductory physics courses. One characteristic distinguishing more experienced physicists from novice students is that they make better use of problem solving…