Background: Many researchers have investigated student reasoning in Newtonian mechanics. In 1979 Viennot revealed that most students associate the concept of force with the velocity or acceleration of a motion. Forty years later, student understandings remain a major challenge for teachers. The implications of this challenge are still unclear,…

The experiment that we present in this paper explores the teaching of Galilean motion principles observed in different reference frames, in an astronomical context. All grade 10 students in a French high school (the lycée Condorcet, Val de Marne) participated in two successive teaching-learning sessions, designed within the theoretical framework…

In this paper we describe the results of some experiments about using surprising physics demonstrations, presented as magical phenomena followed by scientific explanations, for introducing physics topics in several teaching contexts. All the demonstrations have been designed to be implemented with easy to get and cheap materials, so that students…

For research areas to advance, researchers are required to carry out studies that are in line with the inadequacies in the field and to have a grasp of the studies in the field. One of the most important means of identifying inadequacies in a field is to review studies between certain years. In this sense, it is important to analyze the…

The Billotron is a device designed and built by the LPC Caen to illustrate the methods with which physicists are able to study the basic structure of matter, in particular the nucleus of the atom.

In many situations, the change in the conceptual understanding of students is measured using a single question. This is, for instance, the case in peer instruction where students answer twice to the same questions, before and after the discussion phase. Using item response theory and assuming that students proficiencies are normally distributed,…

Background: This work is based on the idea that young children benefit from early introduction of scientific concepts. Few researches describe didactical strategies focusing on physics understanding for young children and analyse their effectiveness in standard classroom environments. Purpose: The aim is to identify whether didactical strategies…

Several studies show that students experience more and more difficulties managing the measurements of electrical values in alternating current and that they have trouble making links between theory and practice. They find it difficult to give meaning to root mean square (RMS; or effective) values, which are not understood as average values and are…

This research documents the impact of a teaching interview aimed at developing a critical attitude in students, and focused on a particular topic: radiocarbon dating. This teaching interview is designed to observe students' reaction to limited written explanations of the phenomenon under study, and their possible frustration or intellectual…

One of the main problems in trying to understand quantum physics is the nature of the referent of quantum theory. This point is addressed in the official French curriculum in upper secondary school. Starting in 2012, after about 20 years of absence, quantum physics has returned to the national program. On the basis of the historical construction…

This paper deals with the nature and the level of difficulty of teaching and learning physics in the first year of undergraduate engineering schools in France. Our case study is based on a survey regarding a classic and basic question in applied physics, and which was conducted with a group of second-year students in a post-baccalaureate 1…

This article presents a new technique for performing most well-known demonstrations of wave optics. Demonstrations which are normally very hard to show to more than a few people can be presented easily to very large audiences with excellent visibility for everyone. The proposed setup is easy to put together and use and can be very useful for…

This particular study is part of a research programme on the difficulties encountered by students when learning about wave phenomena in a three-dimensional medium in the absence or presence of obstacles. It focuses on how students reason in situations in which wave optics need to be used: diffraction of light by an aperture, imaging in the…

This study aims to better understand the construction of the meaning of physics concepts in mechanics during a teaching sequence at the upper secondary school level. In the teaching sessions, students were introduced to the concepts of interaction and force. During this teaching sequence the models called "interactions" and "laws of…

Most physics problem-solving studies provide data that indicate problem representation is different between experts and novices. This paper presents "cognitive aids" guiding the process of elaboration of a problem representation through intermediate representations. Intermediate means that the representation is situated somewhere between…