Related papers: Physics Magic
Physics makes powerful use of mathematics, yet the way this use is made is often poorly understood. Professionals closely integrate their mathematical symbology with physical meaning, resulting in a powerful and productive structure. But…
Physics education research has probed for the relevance of physics in students' everyday lives. Attitudinal and epistemological surveys have asked students if they think of or use physics in their daily lives. We have previously documented…
A generalized view of Duality is offered as a bridge between physical sciences and the more abstract philosophical dimensions bordering on mysticism. To that end several examples of duality are first cited from from conventional physics…
The design of a serious game is presented that served as an instrument to motivate and aid to Physics education using active and ludic learning, specifically the topic of free fall of objects, with diverse educational purposes, first to…
When we teach physics to prospective scientists and engineers we are teaching more than the "facts" of physics - more, even, than the methods and concepts of physics. We are introducing them to a complex culture - a mode of thinking and the…
This article summarizes why physics instructors should use social psychological interventions to make physics classes equitable and inclusive.
Thirty original and collected problems, puzzles, and paradoxes in mathematics and physics are explained in this paper, taught by the author to the elementary and high school teachers at the University of New Mexico - Gallup in 1997-8 and…
Most science classes and in particular Physics are delivered through traditional teaching methods. More specifically, in the traditional stand-and-deliver lecture, the information was transmitted unilaterally from the teacher to the student…
Prior research has demonstrated how the realist perspectives of classical physics students can translate into specific beliefs about quantum phenomena when taking an introductory modern physics course. Student beliefs regarding the…
During the past several years the authors have developed a new approach to the teaching of Physical Science, a general education course typically found in the curricula of nearly every college and university. This approach, called `Physics…
With an investigation into how students in a physics Master of science program make sense of their whole first year study experience in one of the years following a programme reform, we try to offer insights and advice to consider when…
The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…
We show how degeneracies, accidental or otherwise, can obscure some interesting physics. We further show how one can get around this problem.
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…
This article describes five common student misconceptions about succeeding in college-level Physics courses: the miracle finish, the soft hearted professor, an extension of high school, weak areas won't be tested, and passing is more…
Symbolic equations are one of the many representations used in physics. Understanding these representations is important for students because they are how students access knowledge in physics. In this paper I build off of the work by Redish…
Physics and mathematics are difficult enough without the aditional burden of bad habits. In this article, we examine some helpful habits that tend to be underemphasized by many physics teachers (mainly because they seem so obvious!).
It appears paradoxical that science is producing outstanding new results and theories at a rapid rate at the same time that researchers are identifying serious problems in the practice of science that cause many reports to be irreproducible…
This is the first of a series of papers that we intend to publish about the epistemology of fundamental physics in its current state. One of the main objectives of these papers is to improve our understanding of fundamental physics (and…
We address the question "How do students make sense of Physics from the point of view of constituting physics knowledge?". A phenomenographic study is described as a result of which we present six qualitatively different ways in which…