Many learners seem to struggle to grasp the concepts of forces and Newton's law of motion, possibly owing to decontextualised teaching pedagogies used in science classrooms. This study investigates Grade 11 Physical Sciences teachers' perspectives in South Africa on integrating Indigenous Knowledge (IK) to improve learners' understanding of…

Physics phenomena are widely viewed in daily life, and the technical nature of physics makes modern life seem to be simpler than it was many years ago. Physics teaching and learning, on the other hand, has not always been done effectively, especially in developing countries. This study aimed measured the effectiveness using mobile physics on…

Interdisciplinary teaching is a teaching method that is not as easy as other teaching methods to integrate into the everyday school schedule. This paper serves as an example and gives explanations on how this didactic approach can be applied. The lessons described were conducted successfully with a Year 11 class at a secondary school in which the…

The traditional Run the Football Field physics activity--in which students are timed as they move at different speeds on a football field to investigate displacement and velocity--has been updated for the 21st century. Nowadays, GPS-enabled tablets and smartphones replace the stopwatches and yard markers of the past, allowing students to collect…

So far relatively little research in education has explored the pedagogical and learning potentials of applications (Apps) on tablet PCs (TPCs). Drawing upon research on learning technologies and taking an embodied perspective, this study first identified educational functionalities of TPCs and generated guidelines to design educational Apps for…

We present a new system for automated scoring of graph construction items that address complex science concepts, feature qualitative prompts, and support a range of possible solutions. This system utilizes analysis of spatial features (e.g., slope of a line) to evaluate potential student ideas represented within graphs. Student ideas are then…

This study explores the relationship between students' clicking behaviors, discussion processes, learning outcomes, and a prominent feature of clicker systems--the whole class' response results aggregated by clickers in real time. The results indicate that, while teaching Newton's laws of motion, displaying the real-time responses of the whole…

This exploratory study applied a proposed force and motion learning progression (LP) to high-school and university students and to content involving both one- and two-dimensional force and motion situations. The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) was adapted, based on a previous content analysis and coding of the questions in the FCI in terms of the…

This quasi-experimental and pre/posttest study was designed to examine whether fourth-grade students who engaged in collaboratively writing letters to 11th-grade students performed better on tests of conceptual understanding of a unit on force and motion than students who did not. The participants included 835 fourth-grade students and 416…

Students in 4 Canadian high school physics classes completed instructional sequences in two key physics topics related to motion--Straight Line Motion and Newton's First Law. Different sequences of laboratory investigation, teacher explanation (lecture) and the use of computer-based scientific visualizations (animations and simulations) were…

The study investigated tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-grade students' alternative ideas relating to the motion of a body travelling in the field of gravity with an initial horizontal velocity. The sample of the study consisted of 40 tenth-grade students, and 33 and 40 eleventh-grade students that attended different sections of upper secondary…

In the framework of a curriculum reform in the Netherlands, an interdisciplinary open inquiry assignment has been introduced as a part of the final secondary school examinations. We developed and evaluated a preparatory open inquiry assignment to be used in science and mathematics departments of schools, in collaboration with each other: the…