Issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and respect have a history at colleges and universities in the United States. Over 40 years ago, to address these issues at a large public university, the authors created a "tutorial program" (equivalent to a parallel educational system) that enabled a diverse cohort of students to succeed in their…

We examine students' challenges in determining the number of distinct many-particle stationary states for a system of noninteracting identical particles, focusing on how these insights guided the design, validation, and evaluation of a quantum interactive learning tutorial (QuILT) to aid students' understanding. Specifically, we focus on systems…

The ground-breaking image of a black hole's event horizon, which captured the public's attention and imagination in April 2019, was captured using the power of interferometry: many separate telescopes working together to observe the cosmos in incredible detail. Many recent astrophysical discoveries that have revolutionized the scientific…

Here, we describe a free, web-based simulation of the lac operon, "LacOp," that is designed to enhance the learning of prokaryotic gene regulation and pathways in advanced high school and undergraduate genetics courses. This new electronic resource was created by a team of students in an advanced undergraduate course and is hosted online…

Contribution: This study identifies the types of interaction that contribute to student learning with student-led tutorials (SLTs). The quality of these interactions include peer discussion, student tutor presentation, joint reasoning, and constructive feedback. Background: The introduction of SLTs in an advanced electromagnetics bachelor course…

Supporting students in building well-grounded explanations plays a crucial role in scientific practice. Research in organic chemistry education on students' mechanistic explanations, however, has revealed various challenges. When solving mechanistic tasks, students experience difficulties when (I) deriving implicit properties from structural…

The focus of biology education has shifted from memorization to conceptual understanding of core biological concepts such as matter and energy relationships. To examine undergraduate learning about matter and energy, we incorporated constructed-response (CR) questions into an interactive computer-based tutorial. The objective of this tutorial is…

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 degenerate perturbation theory (DPT). The investigation was carried out in advanced quantum mechanics courses by administering free-response and multiple-choice questions and conducting…

"Tutorials in Physics: Quantum Mechanic" is a set of curricular materials for supplementing upperdivision quantum mechanics instruction, developed by the physics education group at the University of Washington. We describe the development of a sequence of three tutorials that focused on quantum measurements and time dependence. This…

A tutorial is a period of instruction given by a university or college tutor to an individual or a very small group. Essentially, it is a small class of a few students in which the tutor (a lecturer or other academic staff member) gives individual attention to every learner. The tutorial focuses on certain subject areas and generally proceeds with…

EvoluZion is a forward-in-time genetic simulator developed in Java and designed to perform real time simulations on the evolutionary history of virtual organisms. These model organisms harbour a set of 13 genes that codify an equal number of phenotypic features. These genes change randomly during replication, and mutant genes can have null,…

A lock-in amplifier is a versatile instrument frequently used in physics research. However, many students struggle with the basic operating principles of a lock-in amplifier which can lead to a variety of difficulties. To improve students' understanding, we have been developing and evaluating a research-based tutorial which makes use of a computer…

Learning quantum mechanics is challenging, even for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Research-validated interactive tutorials that build on students' prior knowledge can be useful tools to enhance student learning. We have been investigating student difficulties with quantum mechanics pertaining to the double-slit experiment in…

Although traditional lectures are still the dominant form of undergraduate instruction, there have been relatively few studies comparing various learner-centered and active learning teaching strategies to one another in order to guide professors in making informed instructional decisions. To study the impact of different active learning…

Research on the learning and teaching of science is an important field for scholarly inquiry by faculty in science departments. Such research has proved to be an efficient means for improving the effectiveness of instruction in physics. A basic topic in introductory physics is used to illustrate how discipline-based education research has helped…