Related papers: Lessons From the Physics-Education Reform Effort
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…
Early-life environments can have long-lasting developmental effects. Interestingly, research on how school reforms affect later-life study behavior has hardly adopted this perspective. Therefore, we investigated a staggered school reform…
Computational physics is a key part of what it means to do physics in the twenty-first century. However, upper division computational physics remains a largely understudied area. We set out to understand the experiences of students in an…
This Physics Today article discusses why the physics community needs to embrace the challenge of educating students with diverse educational backgrounds to meet future research and workforce demands and outlines some of the efforts…
Laboratory courses represent a unique and potentially important component of the undergraduate physics curriculum, which can be designed to allow students to authentically engage with the process of experimental physics. Among other…
Incorporating computer programming exercises in introductory physics is a delicate task that involves a number of choices that may have a strong affect on student learning. We present an approach that speaks to a number of common concerns…
The Physics First movement - teaching a true physics course to ninth grade students - is gaining popularity in high schools. There are several different rhetorical arguments for and against this movement, and it is quite controversial in…
Physics lab courses are an essential part of the physics undergraduate curriculum. Learning goals for these classes often include the ability to interpret measurements and uncertainties. The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) is an…
Students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can greatly impact their actual problem solving practices and also influence their motivation to learn and ultimately the development of expertise. We developed and validated…
The objective of this project is to compare the effectiveness of teaching styles used in high school physics classes and the methods used to assess them. We would like to determine those approaches to physics at the high schools that work…
Pre-post testing is a commonly used method in physics education community for evaluating students' achievement and or the effectiveness of teaching through a specific period of instruction. A popular method to analyze pre-post testing…
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 the spirit of the International Year of Physics 2005 the author advices the replacement of the teaching methods based on verbal explanations and to perform a number of tasks following a given recipe by procedures that actively involve…
In this study, we adapt prior identity framework to investigate the effect of learning environment (including perceived recognition, peer interaction and sense of belonging) on students' physics self-efficacy, interest and identity by…
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…
Over the past decades, the diversity of areas explored by physicists has exploded, encompassing new topics from biophysics and chemical physics to network science. However, it is unclear how these new subfields emerged from the traditional…
Physics outreach programs provide a critical context for informal experiences that promote the transition from new student to contributing physicist. Prior studies have suggested a positive link between participation in informal physics…
The University of Maryland Physics Education Research Group (UMd-PERG) carried out a five-year research project to rethink, observe, and reform introductory algebra-based (college) physics. This class is one of the Maryland Physics…
We have developed the Physics Inventory of Quantitative Literacy (PIQL) as a tool to measure students' quantitative literacy in the context of introductory physics topics. We present the results from various quantitative analyses used to…
The traditional pedagogical paradigm in physics is based on a deductive approach. However, with the recent advances in information technology, we are facing a dramatic increase in the amount of readily available information; hence, the…