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Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a give problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. A major focus while helping introductory physics students learn problem…
We investigate upper-division student difficulties with direct integration in multiple contexts involving the calculation of a potential from a continuous distribution (e.g., mass, charge, or current). Integration is a tool that has been…
Surface sensitive electric current measurements are important experimental tools poorly corroborated by theoretical models. We show that the drift-diffusion equations offer a framework for a consistent description of such experiments. The…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about knowledge and learning can hinder them from…
Some aspects of the ELectrical EXplicit (ELEX) scheme for using explicit integration schemes in circuit simulation are discussed. It is pointed out that the parallel resistor approach, presented earlier to address singular matrix issues…
The electrical conductivity of disordered insulator-conductor composites have been studied for more than thirty years. In spite of this some properties of dc bulk conductivity of composites still remain incompletely understood. We present a…
Circuit diagrams have been used in electrical engineering for decades to describe the wiring of devices and facilities. They depict electrical components in a symbolic and graph-based manner. While the circuit design is usually performed…
We present an inquiry lab activity on Circuit Design that was conducted in Fall 2009 with first-year community college students majoring in Electrical Engineering Technology. This inquiry emphasized the use of engineering process skills,…
The ability to troubleshoot is an important learning outcome for undergraduate physics laboratory courses. To better understand the role of troubleshooting in electronics laboratory courses, we interviewed 20 electronics instructors from…
In recent years there has been growing evidence that even after teaching designed to address the learning difficulties dictated by literature, many physics learners fail to create the proper reasoning chains that connect the fundamental…
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…
Understanding how neural networks arrive at their predictions is essential for debugging, auditing, and deployment. Mechanistic interpretability pursues this goal by identifying circuits - minimal subnetworks responsible for specific…
Several Authors have demonstrated that substituting computer simulations for real experiments conducted in a lab may help to improve students' understanding of the material. In the present work we try to understand the reasons for this…
The results of the National High School Examination (ENEM) are an important tool for a diagnosis of educational deficiencies at the end of a training cycle. This exam is a relevant source of data for the evaluation of what is learned by…
Teaching about measurements and showing examples of instruments' non-ideal behaviour are important in physics education. Digital multimeter input impedance analysis is perfect for this, since these instruments are easily available, precise…
Memristors are nonlinear two-terminal circuit elements whose resistance at a given time depends on past electrical stimuli. Recently, networks of memristors have received attention in neuromorphic computing since they can be used as a tool…
Measurement uncertainty is an important topic in the undergraduate laboratory curriculum. Previous research on student thinking about experimental measurement uncertainty has focused primarily on introductory-level students' procedural…
An important goal of graduate physics core courses is to help students develop expertise in problem solving and improve their reasoning and meta-cognitive skills. We explore the conceptual difficulties of physics graduate students by…
We present a class and home problem in graduate transport phenomena and electrochemical engineering that clarifies a common misconception: electroneutrality implies the electric field is constant. Starting with one-dimensional…
We present an approach to learn about electricity and dc electric circuits by using real representational models based on the gravitational analogy. The additively manufactured models are deployed in a small-scale teaching intervention on…