Related papers: The Vocabulary of Introductory Physics and its Imp…
Learning physics requires understanding the applicability of fundamental principles in a variety of contexts that share deep features. One way to help students learn physics is via analogical reasoning. Students can be taught to make an…
When we teach physics to prospective scientists and engineers we are teaching more than the "facts" of physics - more, even, than the methods and concepts of physics. We are introducing them to a complex culture - a mode of thinking and the…
Mathematical reasoning skills are a desired outcome of many introductory physics courses, particularly calculus-based physics courses. Positive and negative quantities are ubiquitous in physics, and the sign carries important and varied…
Humans have a remarkable ability to use physical commonsense and predict the effect of collisions. But do they understand the underlying factors? Can they predict if the underlying factors have changed? Interestingly, in most cases humans…
Student learning of sound waves can be helped through the creation of group-learning classroom materials whose development and design rely on explicit investigations into student understanding. We describe reasoning in terms of sets of…
Physics is formulated in terms of timeless classical mathematics. A formulation on the basis of intuitionist mathematics, built on time-evolving processes, would offer a perspective that is closer to our experience of physical reality.
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…
Despite the extensive body of research that supports scientific inquiry and argumentation as cornerstones of physics learning, these strategies continue to be virtually absent in most classrooms, especially those that involve students who…
We describe a variant of the popular game "Pictionary" based on terms used in elementary and high school physics. We believe that drawing of physical terms helps students develop a deeper understanding of physical concepts behind them, as…
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…
These lectures deal with the problem of inductive inference, that is, the problem of reasoning under conditions of incomplete information. Is there a general method for handling uncertainty? Or, at least, are there rules that could in…
This resource letter intends to provide physics instructors - particularly graduate student teaching assistants - at the introductory university level with a small but representative collection of resources to acquire a familiarity with…
Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments…
Learning to use math in science is a non-trivial task. It involves many different skills (not usually taught in a math class) that help blend physical knowledge with mathematical symbology. One of these is the idea of quantification: that…
A central goal of Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences (IPLS) is to prepare students to use physics to model and analyze biological situations, a skill of increasing importance for their future studies and careers. Here we report our…
Symbolic equations are one of the many representations used in physics. Understanding these representations is important for students because they are how students access knowledge in physics. In this paper I build off of the work by Redish…
Students in introductory calculus-based physics not only have difficulty understanding the fundamental physical concepts, they often have difficulty relating those concepts to the mathematics they have learned in math courses. This produces…
Fundamental physical constants play important role in modern physics. Studies of their variation can open an interface to new physics. An overview of different approaches to a search for such variations is presented as well as possible…
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…
Just as expert physicists vary in their personal stances on interpretation in quantum mechanics, instructors vary on whether and how to teach interpretations of quantum phenomena in introductory modern physics courses. In this paper, we…