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Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments…
Recruiting and retaining highly qualified physics and physical science teachers is critical for maintaining America's global competitiveness. Unfortunately, only one third of the high school teachers in physics have a degree in physics and…
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…
We describe the development of a junior-senior level course for Physics majors designed to teach Mathematica skills in support of their undergraduate coursework, but also to introduce students to modern research level results. Standard…
We report our experience in two installations of a course on data visualization that featured project-based learning. Given the rationale of this approach, we show which input was provided when necessary for the students to achieve their…
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…
Education is a goal-oriented field. But if we want to treat education scientifically so we can accumulate, evaluate, and refine what we learn, then we must develop a theoretical framework that is strongly rooted in objective observations…
We discuss first experiences with a new variant of self-assessment in higher mathematics education. In our setting, the students of the course have to mark a part of their homework assignments themselves and they receive the corresponding…
We discuss the use of projects in first-year graduate complexity theory courses.
The objective of physics laboratory training is to develop, in students, a variety of important cognitive and psycho-motor abilities related to experimental physics. These include conceptual understanding, procedural understanding,…
We describe a course designed to help future educators build an integrated understanding of the different elements of physics education research (PER), including: research into student learning, content knowledge from the perspective of how…
We introduce and theoretically justify a new measure of the self-recognition component of student physics identity called Self-Evaluated Expertise (SEE). This measure is constructed such that it can be extracted from existing responses to…
Physics faculty care about their students learning physics content. In addition, they usually hope that their students will learn some deeper lessons about thinking critically and scientifically. They hope that as a result of taking a…
The rising demand for higher education has led universities to offer courses in multiple formats, including Intensive Instruction Courses (IICs), to meet the needs of a diverse student body. While active teaching methods improve physics…
Many instructors choose to assess their students using open-ended written exam items that require students to show their understanding of physics by solving a problem and/or explaining a concept. Grading these items is fairly time…
Studying for physics exams can be difficult and stressful, especially during a student's introductory year in physics. For students who do not plan to major in physics, the desire to do well is based less on understanding concepts and more…
Students enrolled in software engineering degrees are generally required to undertake a research project in their final year through which they demonstrate the ability to conduct research, communicate outcomes, and build in-depth expertise…
The use of validated conceptual assessments alongside more standard course exams has become standard practice for the introductory courses in many physics departments. These assessments provide a more standard measure of certain learning…
In recent years, computing has become an important part of the way we teach and learn physics. Teachers, both at high school and college levels, now use computational activities in many of their courses. Physics departments are offering…
One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between formal physical principles and personal experience. However, research has shown that awareness of connections between…