Related papers: Studying Impact and Intent of Design: Conjecture M…
Integrating computation into physics teaching is a curricular move that, at present, has been predominately studied for its cognitive impacts. However, if this modality of instruction shifts how students engage with physics, we argue there…
Many prominent lines of research on student's reasoning and conceptual change within learning sciences and physics education research have not attended to the role of learners' affect or emotions in the dynamics of their conceptual…
Understanding how an instructional approach shapes student's cognitive resources and engagement is central to improving undergraduate physics education especially for novice learners. This study examines how three instructional modalities…
This article describes a curricular innovation designed to help students experience authentic physics inquiry with an emphasis on computational modeling and scientific communication. The educational design centers on a new type of…
Computational thinking in physics has many different forms, definitions, and implementations depending on the level of physics, or the institution it is presented in. In order to better integrate computational thinking in introductory…
Scientific research involves mathematical modelling in the context of an interactive balance between theory, experiment and computation. However, computational methods and tools are still far from being appropriately integrated in the high…
A national survey of physics faculty was conducted to investigate the prevalence and nature of computational instruction in physics courses across the United States. 1246 faculty from 357 unique institutions responded to the survey. The…
Computation is intertwined with essentially all aspects of physics research and is invaluable for physicists' careers. Despite its disciplinary importance, integration of computation into physics education remains a challenge and, moreover,…
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.…
Computation is becoming an increasingly important part of physics education. However, there are currently few theories of learning that can be used to help explain and predict the unique challenges and affordances associated with…
Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and framing. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for…
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…
Computation, the use of a computer to solve, simulate, or visualize a physical problem, has revolutionized how physics research is done. Computation is used widely to model systems, to simulate experiments, and to analyze data. Yet, in most…
Computation is a central aspect of 21st century physics practice; it is used to model complicated systems, to simulate impossible experiments, and to analyze mountains of data. Physics departments and their faculty are increasingly…
The aim of this study is to investigate the decisions and reasoning of undergraduate students when choosing simple measurement instruments in an introductory physics laboratory course. For this study, we have developed a questionnaire and…
With the advent of high-level programming languages capable of quickly rendering three-dimensional simulations, the inclusion of computers as a learning tool in the classroom has become more prevalent. Although work has begun to study the…
Computer experiments refer to the study of real systems using complex simulation models. They have been widely used as alternatives to physical experiments. Design and analysis of computer experiments have attracted great attention in past…
Computational thinking has been a recent focus of education research within the sciences. However, there is a dearth of scholarly literature on how best to teach and to assess this topic, especially in disciplinary science courses. Physics…
Writing and argumentation are critical to both professional physics and physics education. However, the skill of making an extended argument in writing is often overlooked in physics classrooms, apart from certain practices like lab…
Developing expertise in physics requires appropriate integration and assimilation of physics and mathematics. Instructors and students often describe physics courses in terms of their emphasis on conceptual and quantitative problem-solving.…