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Highly successful students, as measured by grades and by scores on the Force Concept Inventory, still struggle with fundamental concepts in mathematics and physics. These difficulties, which turn physics into parrot learning and include…
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…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
Introductory mechanics ("physics 1") is a critical gateway course for students desiring to pursue a STEM career. A major challenge with this course is that there is a large spread in the students' incoming physics preparation, and this…
In this paper we discuss how teaching of mathematics for middle school and high school students can be improved dramatically when motivation of concepts and ideas is done through the classical problems and the history of mathematics. This…
We discuss how a class of difficult kinematic problems can play an important role in an introductory course in stimulating students' reasoning on more complex physical situations. The problems presented here have an elementary analysis once…
This article describes an undergraduate physics module at a university in England that places year 3 student physicists in secondary school classrooms for a semester. This is done as a way of introducing them to the occupation of secondary…
Most educational literature on conceptual change concerns the process by which introductory students acquire scientific knowledge. However, with modern developments in science and technology, the social significance of learning successive…
We describe the development of a junior-senior level course for Physics majors designed to teach Mathematica skills in support of their undergraduate coursework, but also to introduce students to modern research level results. Standard…
In a companion paper, we discuss students' ability to take advantage of what they learn from a solved problem and transfer their learning to solve a quiz problem that has different surface features but the same underlying physics…
The classic brachistrochrone problem is standard material in intermediate mechanics. Many variations exist including some accessible to introductory students. While a quantitative solution isn't feasible in introductory classes, qualitative…
The Doppler effect has many applications in science and engineering fields. Although the format of the classical Doppler effect equation is simple, the derivation for the equation in physics textbooks is not intuitive to many students. This…
This activity was created within the framework of the "Space for Education" project, which aims at experiencing physical principles on the basis of topics related to space travel. This work enables the students to understand how a rocket…
In this paper, I outline some problems in the students' understanding of the explanation of recoil motion when introduced to them in the context of Newton's third law. I propose to explain the origin of recoil from a microscopic point of…
Students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can profoundly influence their motivation to learn and development of expertise. We developed and validated an Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving survey by expanding…
The flipped classroom technique has recently been a focus of attention for many math instructors and pedagogical researchers. Although research on the subject has greatly increased in recent years, it is still debated whether the flipped…
One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between the fundamental principles of classical physics and their personal experience. Nonetheless, numerous studies have shown…
Effective physics learning, especially in complex topics, requires balancing mathematical formalism with conceptual understanding. Conceptual problem-solving involves connecting math to physical reality, and using an epistemological…
The Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy have been designed to help introductory astronomy instructors actively engage their students in developing their conceptual understandings and reasoning abilities across a wide range of…
Identifying the relevant physics principles is a central component of problem solving. A major goal of most introductory physics courses is to help students discern the deep similarities between problems based upon the physics principles so…