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Quantum materials have been in the limelight for several years now. These materials exhibit intriguing quantum phenomena, which when harnessed properly, promise extraordinary advancements across various scientific and technological domains.…
If students are to successfully grapple with authentic, complex biological problems as scientists and citizens, they need practice solving such problems during their undergraduate years. Physics education researchers have investigated…
We present two programs that address needs to better prepare graduate students for their roles as professional physicists, particularly in the areas of teaching and education research. The two programs, Preparing Future Physicists (PFP) and…
A primary goal of many undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in the physical sciences is to prepare students to engage in scientific research, or to prepare students for careers that leverage skillsets similar to those used by research…
In this paper, we describe how we transformed our large-enrollment introductory physics sequence for life-science students to a Lecture/Studio format and aligned the physics concepts with authentic biological applications. We have reformed…
Thermodynamics could be seen as an expression of physics at a high epistemic level. As such, its potential as an inductive bias to help machine learning procedures attain accurate and credible predictions has been recently realized in many…
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…
Art and science are different ways of exploring the world, but together they have the potential to be thought-provoking, facilitate a science-society dialogue, raise public awareness of science, and develop an understanding of art. For…
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'…
Contribution: In this study, an alternative educational approach for introducing quantum computing to a wider audience is highlighted. The proposed methodology considers quantum computing as a generalized probability theory rather than a…
Since 2006, the Pigelleto's Summer School of Physics is an important appointment for orienting students toward physics. It is organized as a full immersion school on actual topics in physics or in fields rarely pursued in high school, i.e.…
Computation is intertwined with essentially all aspects of physics research and is invaluable for physicists' careers. Despite its disciplinary importance, integration of computation into physics education remains a challenge and, moreover,…
The large number of published articles in physics journals under the title "Comments on ..." and "Reply to ..." is indicative that the conceptual understanding of physical phenomena is very elusive and hard to grasp even to experts, but it…
As part of a larger research project into massively open online courses (MOOCs), we have investigated student background, as well as student participation in a physics MOOC with a laboratory component. Students completed a demographic…
This article describes the successful revitalization of an undergraduate physics program. The areas of curriculum development, undergraduate research experiences and advising and retention, to name a few, are emphasized in this…
In the popular imagination, science and technology are often seen as fields of knowledge production critical to social progress and a cooperative future. This optimistic portrayal of technological advancement also features prominently in…
A common learning goal for modern physics instructors is for students to recognize a difference between the experimental uncertainty of classical physics and the fundamental uncertainty of quantum mechanics. Our prior work has shown that…
With this study we tried to investigate if male and female students have a different perception of scientific careers. At the end, we would like to be able to provide hints on how to intervene to correct the path that seems to naturally…
Computation, the use of a computer to solve, simulate, or visualize a physical problem, has revolutionized how physics research is done. Computation is used widely to model systems, to simulate experiments, and to analyze data. Yet, in most…
General-education college astronomy courses offer instructors both a unique audience and a unique challenge. For many students, such a course may be their first time encountering a standalone astronomy class, and it is also likely one of…