This case study used individual interviews to investigate graduate students' sensemaking in upper-level electrostatics in the context of problems that can be efficiently solved for the electric potential using Laplace's equation. Although there are many technical mathematical issues involved in solving Laplace's equation, the focus of this…

Undergraduate science students face difficulties using mathematics in their physics courses. Choosing an institutional perspective, we consider that these students experience a permanent transition between mathematics in their mathematics courses and mathematics in their physics courses. We refer to the anthropological theory of the didactic and…

The Physics One Mechanics in a community college syllabus usually allocates more time to cover the topics in kinematics, dynamics, energy, momentum, and rotation; with relatively less time for the topics of fluid mechanics and heat diffusion in the creation of a knowledge gap for those students deciding on mechanical and chemical engineering…

We use a validated conceptual multiple-choice survey instrument focusing on thermodynamic processes and the first and second laws of thermodynamics at the level of introductory physics to investigate the problem-property dependence of introductory and advanced student responses to introductory thermodynamics problems after traditional…

When authoring physics problems, professors may develop an intuition for how much information they need to provide such that the problem has a unique answer and is not over constrained. It is an open question as to whether using intuition leads to a sufficiently broad range of problems. In this paper we discuss a systematic way of authoring…

Physics experts and students commonly use a variety of representations when working with partial derivatives, including symbols, graphs, and words. One especially powerful representation is the contour graph. In open-ended problem-solving interviews with nine upper-division physics students, we asked students to determine derivatives from contour…

The Widlar current source is one of the basic current sources that undergraduate students encounter throughout their learning process on electronics courses. The Widlar current is actually given in terms of a transcendental equation. Although an analytical solution exists in terms of the Lambert W function it might not be that useful for students…

Students in introductory college physics often have wide ranges of preparation, making it challenging to deliver effective instruction for all. While numerous educational products and strategies have been shown to be broadly effective, there is a need for research-based online materials that support personalized learning and focus specifically on…

Despite continued efforts to address this issue, many students still exhibit misunderstandings regarding Newton's laws. These misconceptions include beliefs, such as every movement requires a force, that force is directly proportional to velocity, and that action-reaction forces can differ in magnitude. To mitigate these misunderstandings,…

Solving problems is crucial for learning physics, and not only final solutions but also their derivations are important. Grading these derivations is labor intensive, as it generally involves human evaluation of handwritten work. AI tools have not been an alternative, since even for short answers, they needed specific training for each problem or…

We report an educational tool for the upper level undergraduate quantum chemistry or quantum physics course that uses a symbolic approach via the PySyComp Python library. The tool covers both time-independent and time-dependent quantum chemistry, with the latter rarely considered in the foundations course due to topic complexity. We use quantized…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Investigating and Improving Quantum Education through Research.] One of the greatest weaknesses of physics education research is the paucity of research on graduate education. While there are a growing number of investigations of graduate student degree progress and admissions, there are very few…

For years there has been an acknowledged interest in having students assess the rationality of their solutions to physics problems. In fact, many textbooks now routinely include end-of-problem assessments as part of the authors' detailed solutions to examples. Over the past two decades, I have experimented with various forms of end-of-problem…

Collaborative learning with peers can lead to students learning from each other and solving physics problems correctly not only in situations in which one student knows how to solve the problems but also when none of the students can solve the problems alone. We define the rate of construction as the percentage of groups collaborating on problem…

Physics is a subject requiring strong logical thinking, and writing a problem-solving path according to logical thinking can enhance students' knowledge and problem-solving ability. The purpose of the study was to explore the effects of problem presentation of different scaffolds (MAPS or dynamic figures) on students' physical problem solving.…