相关论文: Improving Students' Conceptual Understanding of Co…
We explore the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with non-relativistic quantum mechanics of a single particle in one spatial dimension. To investigate these difficulties we developed a conceptual survey and…
We describe a study on the conceptual difficulties faced by college students in understanding hydrodynamics of ideal fluids. This study was based on responses obtained in hundreds of written exams and oral interviews, which were held with…
Computational thinking in physics has many different forms, definitions, and implementations depending on the level of physics, or the institution it is presented in. In order to better integrate computational thinking in introductory…
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…
Quantum mechanics is a challenging subject, even for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Here, we discuss the development and evaluation of research-based concept tests for peer instruction as a formative assessment tool in…
We investigate studnets' use of words used in everyday language as well as in physics. We find students are more likely to identify and explain the meaning of the word as it is used in physics when they have become familiar with the…
The feedback provided by current testing education tools about the deficiencies in a student's test suite either mimics industry code coverage tools or lists specific instructor test cases that are missing from the student's test suite.…
This paper explains a unified approach for teaching the electrical model of power transformers to undergraduate students using magnetic circuits. The commonly used approach for explaining the electrical model of power transformers is a…
We investigate student understanding of energy and momentum concepts at the level of introductory physics by designing and administering a 25-item multiple choice test and conducting individual interviews. We find that most students have…
University students taking introductory physics are generally successful executing mathematical procedures in context, but often struggle with the use of mathematical concepts for sense making. Physics instructors note that their students…
This paper reports on an investigation into the correlations between students' understandings of introductory astronomy concepts and the correctness and coherency of their written responses to targeted Lecture-Tutorial questions. We…
Physics graduate teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for grading. Physics education research suggests that grading practices that place the burden of proof for explicating the problem solving process on students can help them…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than contexts, is considered a hallmark of expertise in physics problem solving. With inspiration from a classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, we compared…
One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between the fundamental principles of classical physics and their personal experience. Nonetheless, numerous studies have shown…
Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students' knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks (the "ConMap" tasks) was developed to probe the…
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…
In this study, we examine introductory physics students' ability to perform analogical reasoning between two isomorphic problems which employ the same underlying physics principles but have different surface features. Three hundred and…
The Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy have been designed to help introductory astronomy instructors actively engage their students in developing their conceptual understandings and reasoning abilities across a wide range of…
Teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for grading in introductory physics courses at large research universities. Their grading practices can shape students' approaches to problem solving and learning. Physics education research…
The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a multiple-choice survey that contains a variety of electricity and magnetism concepts from Coulomb's law to Faraday's law at the level of introductory physics used to help inform…