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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…
Environmental Education (EE) is vital for shaping citizens who understand and value sustainability as an epistemological and practical alternative to mitigate current environmental issues. This research was prompted by the exploration of…
The modeling theory of instruction is widely applied and highly successful in high-school instruction, and seldom in university physics. One reason is lack of familiarity with models in the physics classroom. Ongoing curriculum development…
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…
The gap between theory and practice is well-documented in educational research. Physics teachers' willingness to apply research findings in practice may be influenced by a sceptical attitude towards science education research. This study…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
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…
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…
Even if students can make the blend, interpret physics correctly in mathematical symbology and graphs, they still need to be able to apply that knowledge in productive and coherent ways. As instructors, we can show our solutions to complex…
A survey of 722 physics faculty conducted in 2008 found that many physics instructors had knowledge of research-based instructional strategies (RBISs), were interested in using more, but often discontinued use after trying. Considerable…
The ability to categorize problems is a measure of expertise in a domain. In order to help students learn effectively, instructors and teaching assistants (TAs) should have pedagogical content knowledge. They must be aware of the prior…
Finding good educational policies requires sound estimates of their potential effects. Methods for making such estimates, i.e. finding causal estimands, have made great progress in the last few decades. Nevertheless, serious errors in…
The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to…
As part of a larger study to understand instructors' considerations regarding the learning and teaching of problem solving in an introductory physics course, we investigated beliefs of first-year graduate teaching assistants (TAs) regarding…
Highly successful students, as measured by grades and by scores on the Force Concept Inventory, still struggle with fundamental concepts in mathematics and physics. These difficulties, which turn physics into parrot learning and include…
This study examines the impact of a remote laboratory experiment on Physics learning, using a case study approach. Societal advancements over the past century have spurred discussions regarding restructuring the current educational system,…
Partial differential equations (PDEs) are central to scientific modeling. Modern workflows increasingly rely on learning-based components to support model reuse, inference, and integration across large computational processes. Despite the…
Both the basic educational contents for students and study programs for science teachers include several topics in physics and astronomy, from the simplest ones to others as advanced as nuclear fusion to explain stellar evolution and…
Physics Education Research (PER) is a global endeavour, with a wealth of work performed at a variety of institutions worldwide. However, results from research into undergraduate physics laboratory courses is often difficult to compare due…