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Acquiring the mathematical, conceptual, and problem-solving skills required in university-level physics courses is hard work, and the average student often lacks the knowledge and study skills they need to succeed in the introductory…
Physics education researchers have developed many evidence-based instructional strategies to enhance physics students' conceptual learning. These strategies have historically been tested using assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory…
Broad instructional methods like interactive engagement have been shown to be effective, but such general characterization provides little guidance on the details of how to structure the instructional materials. In this study, we seek…
Student learning in undergraduate physics laboratory courses has garnered increased attention within the PER community. Considerable work has been done to develop curricular materials and pedagogical techniques designed to enhance student…
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…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a given problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. A major focus while helping introductory physics students learn problem…
Understanding how an instructional approach shapes student's cognitive resources and engagement is central to improving undergraduate physics education especially for novice learners. This study examines how three instructional modalities…
We report on a profession-oriented course we offered at the University of Vienna, aimed at physics education teacher students. The course on Theoretical Classical Mechanics has been conceived and designed from its outset with the explicit…
Our recent study showed that two lab courses, whose goals were exclusively to reinforce material developed in the lecture courses, do not have any impact on exam performance at the 1% level. In this study, we replicated this analysis with a…
As research-based self-paced e-learning tools become increasingly available, a critical issue educators encounter is implementing strategies to ensure that all students engage with them as intended. Here, we discuss the effectiveness of…
There have been several modifications of how basic calculus has been taught, but very few of these modifications have considered the computational tools available at our disposal. Here, we present a few tools that are easy to develop and…
A flipped classroom was introduced in pre-service education in order to promote MM and the quality of their use in the teaching and learning process in laboratory. The course, Physics Lab Didactics, promoted active learning through the…
One desired outcome of introductory physics instruction is that students will develop facility with reasoning quantitatively about physical phenomena. Little research has been done regarding how students develop the algebraic concepts and…
This resource letter intends to provide physics instructors - particularly graduate student teaching assistants - at the introductory university level with a small but representative collection of resources to acquire a familiarity with…
We report the conceptual inventory results of a large-scale assessment project at a large university. We studied an attempt at introducing materials and instructional methods informed by physics education research (PER-informed materials)…
The reform of the upper secondary school in Italy has recently introduced physics in the curricula of professional schools, in realities where it was previously absent. Many teachers, often with a temporary position, are obliged to teaching…
Scientific research involves mathematical modelling in the context of an interactive balance between theory, experiment and computation. However, computational methods and tools are still far from being appropriately integrated in the high…
Studies examining gender differences in introductory physics show a consensus when it comes to a gender gap on conceptual assessments; however, the story is not as clear when it comes to differences in gendered performance on exams. This…
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…
This article is based on lecture notes for the Marie Curie Training school "Initial Training on Numerical Methods for Active Matter". It provides an introductory overview of modeling approaches for active matter and is primarily targeted at…