Related papers: Preparing graduate students to be educators
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…
Embedding physics problems unreal-world settings, here termed contextualized physics problems (CPP), is widely believed to foster students' interest, motivation, and learning. However, firm evidence for this claim remains scarce. To explore…
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 recent advancement of large language models presents numerous opportunities for teaching and learning. Despite widespread public debate regarding the use of large language models, empirical research on their opportunities and risks in…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
Computational thinking has been a recent focus of education research within the sciences. However, there is a dearth of scholarly literature on how best to teach and to assess this topic, especially in disciplinary science courses. Physics…
An active learning physics course (treatment) was re-organized in an attempt to increase students' problem solving abilities. This re-organized course covered all of the relevant concepts in the first 6 weeks with the final 4 weeks spent in…
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…
We discuss and analyze the fact that physics is generally losing its ability to captivate students who may possess the potential to enhance the quality of our future in this age of technology. We have tried to investigate the reasons behind…
To help faculty use research-based materials in a more significant way, we learn about their perceived needs and desires and use this information to suggest ways for the Physics Education Research community to address these needs. When…
A central goal of Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences (IPLS) is to prepare students to use physics to model and analyze biological situations, a skill of increasing importance for their future studies and careers. Here we report our…
It is becoming increasingly important that physics educators equip their students with the skills to work with data effectively. However, many educators may lack the necessary training and expertise in data science to teach these skills. To…
This paper describes a tool, the Guided Reflection Form (GRF), which was used to promote reflection in a modeling-based physics course. Each week, students completed a guided reflection and received feedback from their instructors. These…
This is a report on a qualitative study of students' learning where a physics computer simulation session is used to supplement lectures on the topic. Drawing on phenomenography as the analytical framework, the students' learning-focuses…
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…
Incorporating computer programming exercises in introductory physics is a delicate task that involves a number of choices that may have a strong affect on student learning. We present an approach that speaks to a number of common concerns…
Since 2005, the global flagship of outreach activities in high-energy physics have been the International Particle Physics Masterclasses. We report on a survey performed among the participants from Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where we…
Through in-class observations of teaching assistants (TAs) and students in the lab sections of a large introductory physics course, we study which TA behaviors can be used to predict student engagement and, in turn, how this engagement…
Across the field of education research there has been an increased focus on the development, critique, and evaluation of statistical methods and data usage due to recently created, very large data sets and machine learning techniques. In…
The large number of published articles in physics journals under the title "Comments on ..." and "Reply to ..." is indicative that the conceptual understanding of physical phenomena is very elusive and hard to grasp even to experts, but it…