Prior to instruction, students often possess a common-sense view of motion, which is inconsistent with Newtonian physics. Effective physics lessons therefore involve conceptual change. To provide a theoretical explanation for concepts and how they change, the triangulation model brings together key attributes of prototypes, exemplars, theories,…

Classical mechanics challenges students to use their intuitions and experiences as a basis for understanding, in effect to approach learning as "a refinement of everyday thinking'' (Einstein, 1936). Moving on to quantum mechanics (QM), students, like physicists, need to adjust this approach, in particular with respect to the roles that…

End-Of-Chapter (EOC) problems have been part of many physics education studies. Typically, only problems "localized" as relevant to a single chapter were used. This work examines how well this type of problem represents all EOC problems and whether EOC problems found in leading textbooks have changed over the past several decades. To…

The purpose of this three study dissertation is to investigate why students are enrolled in introductory physics courses experience difficulties in being successful; one possible source of their difficulties is related to their epistemology. In order to investigate students' epistemologies about mathematics and physics, students were observed…

As we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century, one may predict that the environment will be among the dominant themes in the political and educational discourse. Over the past three decades, particular perspectives regarding the environment have begun to emerge: (i) realization by human beings that we not only live on earth and use…

With the growing push to include computational modeling in the physics classroom, we are faced with the need to better understand students' computational modeling practices. While existing research on programming comprehension explores how novices and experts generate programming algorithms, little of this discusses how domain content…

The use of science classroom discourse analysis as a way to gain a better understanding of various student cognitive outcomes has a rich history in Science Education in general and Physics Education Research (PER) in particular. When students talk to each other in a collaborative peer instruction environment, such as in the CLASP classes…

The purpose of this study is to investigate student interactions with simulations, and teacher support of those interactions, within naturalistic high school physics classroom settings. This study focuses on data from two lesson sequences that were conducted in several physics classrooms. The lesson sequences were conducted in a whole class…