相关论文: Student Reasoning About the Divergence of a Vector…
Understanding Maxwell's equations in differential form is of great importance when studying the electrodynamic phenomena discussed in advanced electromagnetism courses. It is therefore necessary that students master the use of vector…
Undergraduate physics students are known to have difficulties with understanding mathematical tools, and with applying their knowledge of mathematics to physical contexts. Using survey statements based on student interviews and written…
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…
Formally investigating the sources of students' difficulties around specific subjects is crucial for developing appropriate strategies to help students. We have been studying difficulties in understanding magnetism encountered by students…
Vector fields are a highly abstract physical concept that is often taught using visualizations. Although vector representations are particularly suitable for visualizing quantitative data, they are often confusing, especially when…
Throughout introductory physics, students create and interpret free body diagrams in which multiple forces act on an object, typically at a single location (the object's center of mass). The situation increases in difficulty when multiple…
Students are taught several models of conductivity, both at the introductory and the advanced level. From early macroscopic models of current flow in circuits, through the discussion of microscopic particle descriptions of electrons flowing…
Upper-division physics students spend much of their time solving problems. In addition to their basic skills and background, their epistemic framing can form an important part of their ability to learn physics from these problems.…
We investigate learning difficulties among second-year students on electromagnetism courses when they apply Amp\`ere-Maxwell's law. Using phenomenography, we analysed written answers from 65 undergraduate physics students to four questions…
Taming diffusion models for generative segmentation has attracted increasing attention. While existing approaches primarily focus on architectural tweaks or training heuristics, there remains a limited understanding of the intrinsic…
The theorems of vector analysis (divergence theorem, etc.) are typically first applied in the undergraduate physics curriculum in the context of the electromagnetic field and the differential forms of Maxwell's equations. However, these…
Separation of variables can be a powerful technique for solving many of the partial differential equations that arise in physics contexts. Upper-division physics students encounter this technique in multiple topical areas including…
We discuss an investigation of student difficulties with the corrections to the energy spectrum of the hydrogen atom for the intermediate field Zeeman effect using the degenerate perturbation theory. The investigation was carried out in…
Helping students learn why Gauss' law can or cannot be easily applied to determine the strength of the electric field at various points for a particular charge distribution, and then helping them learn to determine the shape of the Gaussian…
We discuss the clusters of resources that emerge when upper-division students write about electromagnetic fields in linear materials. The data analyzed for this paper comes from students' written tests in an upper-division electricity and…
Research has shown that both high school and university students' reasoning patterns regarding direct current resistive electric circuits often differ from the currently accepted explanations. At present, there are no standard diagnostic…
Diagrams are ubiquitous in physics, especially in physics education and physics problem solving. Problem solvers may generate diagrams to orient to a scenario, to organize information, to directly extract an answer, or as a tool of…
Learning advanced physics, in general, is challenging not only due to the increased mathematical sophistication but also because one must continue to build on all of the prior knowledge acquired at the introductory and intermediate levels.…
Identifying and understanding student difficulties with physics content in a wide variety of topical areas is an active research area within the PER community. In many cases, physics topics appear multiple times in different contexts across…
Many undergraduate students of engineering and the exact sciences have difficulty with their mathematics courses due to insufficient proficiency in what we in this paper have termed clear thinking. We believe that this lack of proficiency…