Related papers: Identifying Student Difficulties with Understandin…
Formally investigating the sources of students' difficulties around specific subjects is crucial for developing appropriate strategies to help students. We have been studying difficulties in understanding magnetism encountered by students…
A vast scientific literature in physics education documents a general widespread difficulty in dealing with Electro-Magnetic Induction (EMI) at various levels of instruction. But, at the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of research…
Faraday's Law of induction is often stated as "a change in magnetic flux causes an EMF"; or, more cautiously, "a change in magnetic flux is associated with an EMF"; It is as well that the more cautious form exists, because the first…
The concept of electromotive force (emf) may be introduced in various ways in an undergraduate course of theoretical electromagnetism. The multitude of alternate expressions for the emf is often the source of confusion to the student. We…
We examine the difficulties that introductory physics students, undergraduate physics majors, and physics graduate students have with concepts related to conductors and insulators covered in introductory physics by giving written tests and…
Throughout introductory physics, students create and interpret free body diagrams in which multiple forces act on an object, typically at a single location (the object's center of mass). The situation increases in difficulty when multiple…
We investigate learning difficulties among second-year students on electromagnetism courses when they apply Amp\`ere-Maxwell's law. Using phenomenography, we analysed written answers from 65 undergraduate physics students to four questions…
Experimental validation of the Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction (EMI) is performed when an electromotive force is generated in thin copper turns, located inside a large magnetic coil. It has been established that the electromotive…
It is well established that neutrinos have mass, yet it is very difficult to measure those masses directly. Within the standard model of particle physics, neutrinos will have an intrinsic magnetic moment proportional to their mass. We…
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,…
We discuss research involving the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) to evaluate one aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of teaching assistants (TAs): the knowledge of introductory students' alternate conceptions…
We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students'…
Students are taught several models of conductivity, both at the introductory and the advanced level. From early macroscopic models of current flow in circuits, through the discussion of microscopic particle descriptions of electrons flowing…
Measurements of magnetic induction near an ice rod in the strong electric field were carried out. Theoretical estimation of the magnetic induction was made. It was found that in the average the experimental values of magnetic induction were…
Gravitational effects produced by ELF electromagnetic radiation upon the electric current in a conductor are studied. An apparatus has been constructed to test the behavior of current subjected to ELF radiation. The experimental results are…
This paper re-centres the discussion of student learning in physics to focus on context. In order to do so, a theoretically-motivated understanding of context is developed. Given a well-defined notion of context, data from a novel…
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…
The approach to the concept of electromagnetic induction in physics education can present challenges, particularly regarding its distance from students' everyday experiences. The functioning of an electric guitar pickup can serve as an…
The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a multiple-choice survey that contains a variety of electricity and magnetism concepts from Coulomb's law to Faraday's law at the level of introductory physics used to help inform…
We discuss an investigation exploring students' difficulties with equations involving resistance, capacitance and inductance. We find that introductory physics students have great difficulty understanding, e.g., how the resistance of an…