Sound is one of the most commonly used physical phenomena that most of us use without considering its nature. Moreover, students often face difficulties in understanding acoustic phenomena, the most frequent one of which is the substance-based view of sound instead of a process of pressure and density differences. The current study introduces…

Along-standing energy lab involves dropping bouncy balls and measuring their rebound heights on successive bounces. The lab demonstrates a situation in which the mechanical energy of a system is not conserved. Although students enjoyed the lab, the author wanted to deepen their thinking about energy, including the connections to motion, with a new…

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…

Many science education researchers have argued that learners' commitment to a substance (matter-based) ontology impedes the learning of scientific concepts that scientists typically conceptualize as processes or interactions, such as force, electric current, and heat. By this account, students' tendency to classify these entities as…

The aim of this study is to draw attention to the informal education aspect of the movies shown and to determine the awareness levels about physics in movies of a small group composed of university students. That is an evaluation had been made among the films dealing explicitly with the basic content of physics, except for science fiction movies,…

In this article, we provide a discussion on our revision method (termed "prescriptive tutoring") aimed at revealing students' misconceptions and misunderstandings by getting them to solve physics problems with an anonymous partner via the computer. It is currently being implemented and evaluated in a public secondary school in Singapore,…