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One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
The physics that underpins modern technology is based on Einstein's theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Most school students complete their compulsory science education without being taught any of these Einsteinian concepts. Only…
We are investigating cognitive issues in learning quantum mechanics in order to develop effective teaching and learning tools. The analysis of cognitive issues is particularly important for bridging the gap between the quantitative and…
We examine the difficulties that introductory physics students, undergraduate physics majors, and physics graduate students have with concepts related to conductors and insulators covered in introductory physics by giving written tests and…
From a department being resistant to change to students not buying into the new computational activities, the challenges that are faced with integrating computation into the physics undergraduate curriculum are varied. The Partnership for…
Differentiable physics provides a new approach for modeling and understanding the physical systems by pairing the new technology of differentiable programming with classical numerical methods for physical simulation. We survey the rapidly…
The quantum mechanical commutation relations, which are directly related to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, have a crucial importance for understanding the quantum mechanics of students. During undergraduate level courses, the…
The physics community explores and explains the physical world through a blend of theoretical and experimental studies. The future of physics as a discipline depends on training of students in both the theoretical and experimental aspects…
We present results of our investigation into student understanding of the physical significance and utility of the Boltzmann factor in several simple models. We identify various justifications, both correct and incorrect, that students use…
Much of the research done by modern physicists would be impossible without the use of computation. And yet, while computation is a crucial tool of practicing physicists, physics curricula do not generally reflect its importance and utility.…
We show how Geophysics may illustrate and thus improve classical Mechanics lectures concerning the study of Coriolis force effects. We are then interested in atmospheric as well as oceanic phenomena we are familiar with, and are for that…
In this thesis I discuss combinatorial optimization problems, from the statistical physics perspective. The starting point are the motivations which brought physicists together with computer scientists and mathematicians to work on this…
A comprehensive introduction to the theory of the solar neutrino problem is given that is aimed at instructors who are not experts in quantum field theory but would like to incorporate these ideas into instruction of advanced undergraduate…
We describe a course designed to help future educators build an integrated understanding of the different elements of physics education research (PER), including: research into student learning, content knowledge from the perspective of how…
Whoever has to learn or to teach thermodynamics is confronted with conceptual difficulties which are specific to this field of physics ([1],[2]). It seems that they can be eliminated by inserting relativity in the thermodynamic theory. The…
How students use mathematics in their physics classes has been studied extensively in the physics education literature. In addition to specific mathematical methods in specific physics contexts, possible effects of more general "cultural"…
In this work, I present an automatic system for the evaluation of closed-type exercises in physics at the high school level or in the first year of a degree where physics is a mandatory course. It is expected that this will allow students…
During the last decade we have witnessed an impressive development in so-called interpreted languages and computational environments such as Maple, Mathematica, IDL, Matlab etc. Problems which until recently were typically solved on…
The notion of microscopic state of the system at a given moment of time as a point in the phase space as well as a notion of trajectory is widely used in classical mechanics. However, it does not have an immediate physical meaning, since…
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…