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As 2005, the International Year of Physics, comes to an end, two physicists working primarily in geophysical research reflect on how geophysics is not an applied physics. Although geophysics has certainly benefited from progress in 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…
Asking questions during class time is one form of participation not commonly employed by members of underrepresented groups in large enrollment college classrooms, even though the form of participation is highly conducive to student…
One of the main activities in science teaching, and in particular in Physics teaching, is not only the discussion of both modern problems and problems which solution is an urgent matter. It means that the picture of an active and alive…
In 2016, the Department of Physics at Oregon State University began a process to revise our Paradigms in Physics curriculum for physics majors. We began with a colloquium to inform the department of our plans and request their assistance,…
Experimental activities are an essential part of physics education. In addition to conveying scientific knowledge, they play a significant role in developing scientific literacy, inquiry skills, and critical thinking. In today's world,…
A workshop using dance to introduce particle physics concepts to young children is presented. The workshop is realised in the dance studio, the children assume complete ownership of the activity and dance becomes the means to express ideas.…
Since 1993, the University of Massachusetts Physics Education Research Group (UMPERG) has developed curriculum and pedagogic techniques for use with classroom communication systems (CCSs) and has researched the effectiveness of CCS-based…
A priority of physics instruction is to help students make the connection between the formulae they think they are required to memorize and the real world in which they interact every day. If you ask students to describe a situation in real…
Quantum physics is considered as one of the most remarkable discoveries of contemporary physics grown during previous century and gradually manifested to the scientific world such as inventions of laser, the transistor, the electron…
This study explores the thematic evolution of articles in The Physics Teacher and Physics Education journals, over a critical period in modern history, from the Cold War era to the pre-pandemic world (1966 - 2019). Using an NLP-based…
More than a decade ago Edwin Taylor issued a "call to action" that presented the case for basing introductory university mechanics teaching around the principle of stationary action. We report on our response to that call in the form of an…
Instructors in introductory physics courses often use labs and demonstrations to reinforce that the physics equations introduced in lectures and textbooks describe what actually happens in the real world. The surface features and…
This paper describes a new approach for learning from homework, called Peer-Assisted Reflection (PAR). PAR involves students using peer feedback to improve their work on open-ended homework problems. Collaborating with peers and revising…
The case-study teaching method has a long history (starting at least with Socrates), and wide current use in business schools, medical schools, law schools, and a variety of other disciplines. However, relatively little use is made of it in…
Physics has a bad press: it is seen by a majority of people as a boring discipline ever since their High School days. There is no glamour to it, just toil and pain, and for many who engaged in it, the end sight is often unemployment. Could…
A non-native English speaking physics professor formulates obvious yet useful rules for writing research papers.
Almost all theories of physics have expressed physical laws by means of differential equations. One can ask: why differential equations? What is special about them? This article addresses these questions and is presented as an inquiry-based…
When education researchers describe newly developed curricular materials, they typically concentrate on the research base behind their design, and the efficacy of the final products, but do not highlight the initial stages of creating the…
A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in…