Since the vibration of a single pendulum is very periodic, measuring its period is a very interesting topic. When students are asked to measure the period of a single vibration, they start and stop the stopwatch when the pendulum reaches the top point as a reference point. In this paper, we try to show that the error can be reduced more by using…

Many statistical methods (estimators) are available for estimating the consensus value (or average effect) and heterogeneity variance in interlaboratory studies or meta-analyses. These estimators are all valid because they are developed from or supported by certain statistical principles. However, no estimator can be perfect and must have error or…

Measuring one physical quantity as a function of another often requires making some choices prior to the measurement process. Two of these choices are: the data range where measurements should focus and the number (n) of data points to acquire in the chosen data range. Here, we consider data range as the interval of variation of the independent…

Smartphones and tablets are used as experimental tools and for quantitative measurements in two traditional laboratory experiments for undergraduate physics courses. The Doppler effect is analyzed and the speed of sound is determined with an accuracy of about 5% using ultrasonic frequency and two smartphones, which serve as rotating sound emitter…

This article introduces new statistics for evaluating score consistency. Psychologists usually use correlations to measure the degree of linear relationship between 2 sets of scores, ignoring differences in means and standard deviations. In medicine, biology, chemistry, and physics, a more stringent criterion is often used: the extent to which…

Contends that the nature of physics has been misrepresented by blurring or ignoring important distinctions between "errors" and "discrepancies" and that dealing with these and related problems can improve students' enjoyment of labs and understanding of physics. Nature of physics, role of experiments, experimental errors, and error analysis are…

Classifies errors as either systematic or blunder and uncertainties as either systematic or random. Discusses use of error/uncertainty analysis in direct/indirect measurement, describing the process of planning experiments to ensure lowest possible uncertainty. Also considers appropriate level of error analysis for high school physics students'…