Related papers: Learning physics in context: a study of student le…
Quantum science is in the news daily and engages student interest and curiosity. A fundamental quantum science concept that underpins medical imaging, quantum computing and many future technologies is quantum spin. Quantum spin can explain…
During recent collaboration with colleagues to revise our institution's general-education curriculum, I encountered many perceptions of what we mean by the Natural Sciences. I was surprised to find that perceptions of scientific pedagogy…
Case-oriented physics education research - which seeks to refine and develop theory by linking that theory to cases - incorporates distinct practices for selecting data for analysis, generalizing results, and making causal claims.…
The present technical notes offer a brief summary of the essential points of electromagnetism at the undergraduate physics level. Some problems are presented at the end of each section; those with solutions are marked with an asterisk.
Mathematics is the language of science. Fluent and productive use of mathematics requires one to understand the meaning embodied in mathematical symbols, operators, syntax, etc., which can be a difficult task. For instance, in algebraic…
The concept of "force" is abstract and challenging for many physics students, and many studies have revealed misconceptions that hinder students' understanding and learning in classical physics. One reason for this may be that physics…
One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between the fundamental principles of classical physics and their personal experience. Nonetheless, numerous studies have shown…
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…
Physics Education Research frequently investigates what students studying physics do on small time scales (e.g. single courses, observations within single courses), or post-education time scales (e.g., what jobs do physics majors get?) but…
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,…
Learning to think like a physicist (LTP) is often cited as a central goal of graduate physics education, yet what this means in practice and the extent to which physics graduate education prepares students to develop LTP and view LTP as…
The space-time of modern physics is tailored on light. We rigorously construct the basic entities needed by kinematics: geometry of the physical space and time, using as tool electromagnetic waves, and particularly light-rays. After such a…
The Physics Education Group at the University of Washington is examining the extent to which students are able to use graphs of potential energy vs. position to infer kinematic and dynamic quantities for a system. The findings indicate that…
The results of the National High School Examination (ENEM) are an important tool for a diagnosis of educational deficiencies at the end of a training cycle. This exam is a relevant source of data for the evaluation of what is learned by…
Learning advanced physics, in general, is challenging not only due to the increased mathematical sophistication but also because one must continue to build on all of the prior knowledge acquired at the introductory and intermediate levels.…
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…
Mathematical reasoning skills are a desired outcome of many introductory physics courses, particularly calculus-based physics courses. Positive and negative quantities are ubiquitous in physics, and the sign carries important and varied…
Most introductory quantum physics instructors would agree that transitioning students from classical to quantum thinking is an important learning goal, but may disagree on whether or how this can be accomplished. Although (and perhaps…
Popular media is an unspoken yet ever-present element of the physics landscape and a tool we can utilize in our teaching. It is also well-understood that students enter the physics classroom with a host of conceptions learned from the world…
Momentum exists in the physics community for integrating computation into the undergraduate curriculum. One of many benefits would be preparation for computational research. Our investigation poses the question of which computational skills…