Related papers: Making sense of studying physics
Diversity has an important, multifaceted role in the success of education. I have used a corpus analysis of the first ten years of Physical Review Physics Education Research to investigate the diversity, broadly defined, of physics…
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…
Even if students can make the blend, interpret physics correctly in mathematical symbology and graphs, they still need to be able to apply that knowledge in productive and coherent ways. As instructors, we can show our solutions to complex…
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…
We discuss a case study of the influence of epistemology on learning for a student in an introductory college physics course. An analysis of videotaped class work, written work, and interviews indicates that many of the student's…
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…
We report on our study of student understanding of the physics of mechanical waves, specifically the propagation and superposition of simple wavepulses traveling on long, taut strings. We introduce the terms "particle pulses mental model"…
It is now widely believed that research should be an essential and integral part of under-graduate studies. In recent years there has been a conscious effort to bring research opportunities to the physics under-graduates in India. We argue…
Physics students can encounter difficulties in physics problem solving as a result of failing to use knowledge that they have but do not perceive as relevant or appropriate. In previous work the authors have demonstrated that some of these…
Joining a research group is one of the most important events on a graduate student's path to becoming an independent physics researcher and earning a PhD. However, graduate students' perspectives on the experience of finding a research…
Upper-division physics students spend much of their time solving problems. In addition to their basic skills and background, their epistemic framing can form an important part of their ability to learn physics from these problems.…
Science education at all levels is currently undergoing dramatic changes to its curricula and developing assessments for these new curricula is paramount. We have used the basis of many of these new changes (scientific practices,…
In the symposium contributions we discuss research in physics education and the consequences of its results for physics teaching. The symposium presents four different aspects of physics teaching and learning, but all of them have…
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…
We investigated the effects of student-generated problems on exams. The process was gradual with some training throughout the semester. Initial results were highly positive with the students involved performing significantly better, and…
It has been reported that students often leave the introductory physics classroom believing that physics is less connected to the real world than when they entered. In this paper we aim to complicate that narrative by considering students'…
It is generally accepted that the retention and associated completion rates for first year classes are an area of concern for UK universities, and physics and astronomy classes at the University of Glasgow are exception. Classes are often…
Students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can profoundly influence their motivation to learn and development of expertise. We developed and validated an Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving survey by expanding…
Students who successfully engage in self-regulated learning, are able to plan their own studying, monitoring their progress and make any necessary adjustments based upon the data and feedback they gather. In order to promote this type of…
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…