Related papers: Making sense of studying physics
Mathematics is an essential element of physics problem solving, but experts often fail to appreciate exactly how they use it. Math may be the language of science, but math-in-physics is a distinct dialect of that language. Physicists tend…
Systematic observations of student gestures can not only fill in gaps in students' verbal expressions, but can also offer valuable information about student ideas, including their source, their novelty to the speaker, and their construction…
The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows, on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to understand…
Undergraduate research has become an essential mode of engaging and retaining students in physics. At Loyola University Chicago, first-year physics students have been participating in the Freshman Projects program for over twenty years,…
In this paper we put forth a model for physics course reform that uniquely uses proven, research-based active learning strategies to help students improve their physics knowledge and problem-solving skills. In this study, we compared the…
We are trying to identify resources students are using to reason in quantum mechanics. In this process we realize students must have not only the right resources available but sophisticated for evaluating and controlling their thought…
There is an increasing pressure for lecturers to work with two goals. First, they need to ensure their undergraduate students have a good grasp of the knowledge and skills of the intellectual field. In addition, they need to prepare…
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…
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 report on a large-scale study of student learning of quantum tunneling in 4 traditional and 4 transformed modern physics courses. In the transformed courses, which were designed to address student difficulties found in previous research,…
Six specific modes of reasoning about ratio and proportion have been delineated as a means of operationalizing expert practice. These modes stem from consideration of how physicists reason in context, are informed by prior work in physics…
To effectively prepare engineering students requires of formation of a system of fundamental physical knowledge together with the ability to apply them in specific productive activities, both on fundamental and on the profiled-oriented…
Identifying the relevant physics principles is a central component of problem solving. A major goal of most introductory physics courses is to help students discern the deep similarities between problems based upon the physics principles so…
While proof is a central component of postsecondary mathematical study, proof construction has historically posed significant difficulties for students who intend to earn mathematics degrees at the undergraduate level. This work is…
It is becoming common to hear teaching advice about spending more time on the "physics of the problem" so that students will get more physical insight and develop a stronger intuition that can be very helpful when thinking about physics…
Every year in each university many students are graduated holding a first university degree. For example Bachelor degree in Computer Science. Most of those students have a motivation to continue with further studies to get higher education…
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…
Learning to create, use, and evaluate models is a central element of becoming a scientist. In physics, we often begin an analysis of a complex system with highly simplified or toy models. In introductory physics classes, we tend to use them…
Since I first became enthralled with physics as a teenager, I've been intrigued by the philosophical aspects of the discipline. As I approached the end of my career as an experimental physicist and observational astronomer (I'm now…
Mathematics is a critical part of much scientific research. Physics in particular weaves math extensively into its instruction beginning in high school. Despite much research on the learning of both physics and math, the problem of how to…