In this study, which aims to help grade nine students overcome the misconceptions about electric current, we identified their misconceptions about this concept and then designed and implemented a playground activity as an analogy of electric current. Through the conceptual change texts approach, which we have enhanced with experience, we use this…

Many researches show that students have difficulties in understanding graphics in kinematics. Some authors argue that we can use different instructional strategies to reduce these difficulties. Based on these studies, we developed and applied a didactic sequence using educational robotics to teach graphic analysis in movements in a dimension with…

The first law of thermodynamics involves several types of energies and many studies have shown that students lack awareness of them. They have difficulties in applying the law to different thermodynamic processes. These observations were confirmed in our pilot studies, carried out with students from undergraduate colleges across the whole of…

Tutorials in introductory physics (TIP) are a well known resource for use in third level insititutions for developing students' understanding of physics concepts. However, this resource is only sparingly used at second level. This study presents an adaptation of the approach taken in TIP to enhance the understanding of vector addition of a group…

This project produced an online astronomy course based on the free, online OpenStax textbook. When this project was conceived, about a year before the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors had no idea that in a short period of time, most college and university classes would be online. This abrupt change in modalities of courses, from traditional,…

This study compares synchronous versus asynchronous online teaching in an introductory calculus-based physics class. Like many schools, our institution transitioned to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. We held optional synchronous online sessions during the original class time, and approximately half of our students were regular…

The decline in students' interest in science and technology is a major concern in the western world. One approach to reversing this decline is to introduce modern physics concepts much earlier in the school curriculum. We have used the context of the recent discoveries of gravitational waves to test the benefits of one-day interventions, in which…

This study compared students' learning in troubleshooting and problem solving activities. The troubleshooting activities provided students with solutions to conceptual problems in the form of refutation texts; namely, solutions that portray common misconceptions, refute them, and then present the accepted scientific ideas. They required students…

In this paper a teaching-learning sequence (TLS) introducing pre-service elementary teachers (PET) to weather map reading, with emphasis on wind assignment, is presented. The TLS includes activities about recognition of wind symbols, assignment of wind direction and wind speed on a weather map and identification of wind characteristics in a…

Probing university students' understanding of direct-current (DC) resistive circuits is still a field of active physics education research. We report here on a study we conducted of this understanding, where the cohort consisted of students in a large-enrollment first-year physics module. This is a non-calculus based physics module for students in…

This paper reports the use of Tracker as a computer-based learning tool to support effective learning and teaching of "toss up" and free fall motion for beginning secondary three (15?year-old) students. The case study involved (N = 123) students from express pure physics classes at a mainstream school in Singapore. We used eight…

A key question in physics education is the effectiveness of the teaching methods. A curriculum that has been investigated at the University of Central Florida (UCF) over the last two years is the use of particular elements of The Physics Suite. Select sections of the introductory physics classes at UCF have made use of Interactive Lecture…