The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is one of the research-based assessments established by the physics education research community to measure students' understanding of Newtonian mechanics. Former works have often recorded the notion of gendered mean FCI scores favoring male students notably in the North American (NA) based studies. Nevertheless,…

Over the course of instruction, not only does most introductory physics students' content knowledge evolve but their attitudes and approaches to problem solving are also likely to evolve. This change may depend on many factors including the curricula and pedagogies used, the degree to which instruction actively engages students in the learning…

In this paper, the level of conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics among Afghan school and university students in Kabul, Afghanistan was investigated. This study employed a quantitative descriptive survey method where the Pashto version of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) was given to a random sample of 216 students from two schools and…

Over the last decade, the "gender gap" in physics conceptual inventory scores has been extensively studied by the physics education research community. Researchers have identified many factors that influence the overall differences in post-test scores between men and women. More recently, it has been shown that the Force Concept…

This thesis explores impact of evidence-based active-engagement courses (EBAE) on student achievement and gender gap in introductory physics. The first study is about the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of the physics teaching assistants (TAs) at identifying introductory students' difficulties using the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and…