Students come to their high school physics classroom with experiences and knowledge that can be used to help explain physics concepts, but those experiences may not fully align with the scientifically accepted science concept. When there is a misalignment between a student's prior knowledge and the scientifically accepted concept a misconception…

Electricity and magnetism are fundamental areas of physics and are integral to science curricula at various educational levels. However, this area has been reported to contain several concepts that students find challenging, leading to perspectives that diverge from scientifically accepted views. This study examines the errors made by physics…

Physics teachers need diagnostic competence to effectively identify students' misconceptions, but studies have yet to sufficiently investigate how this competence can be advanced through various instructional strategies. In this study, we compared a problem-solving strategy against an example-based strategy in advancing diagnostic competence in…

This study investigated how visual attention differed between students who hold scientific knowledge and those who have misconceptions. We analyzed visual fixations of 98 middle students on problems containing information relevant to scientific knowledge and common misconceptions. It showed that students who acquired scientific concepts paid more…

Student learning in simple electric circuits has been extensively studied, which has revealed a large number of persistent misunderstandings. This study applies the conceptual framework model to investigate student difficulties in the knowledge integration perspective. The results are used to guide the design of a concept test that targets the…

Research indicates that troubleshooting activities that require students to reflect on pre-prepared erroneous examples, i.e. erroneous solutions to problems that correspond to common naïve ideas, impact their learning positively. These include asking students to diagnose erroneous examples; in other words, detect the conceptual errors and then…

Students' difficulties in quantum mechanics may be the result of unproductive framing rather than a fundamental inability to solve the problems or misconceptions about physics content. Using the theoretical lens of epistemological framing, we applied previously developed frames to seek an underlying structure to the long lists of published…

Light interference is an essential topic for understanding the wavelike nature of light, however, there are limited studies on modeling and assessing students' misconceptions and learning difficulties in this area. Based on the knowledge integration modeling approach, a conceptual framework for light interference is developed and used to model…

This article presents a possible framework for the cooperation of mathematics and physics education research domains. Moreover, the potential topics for such a scientific collaboration are explained by means of a structuring qualitative content analysis of current handbooks and conference proceedings in Germany and Vietnam. These topics can form a…

The concept of electric current is fundamental in the study of electrical engineering (EE). Students are often exposed to this concept in their daily lives and early in middle school education. Lower-division university courses are usually limited to the study of passive electronic devices and simple electric circuits. Semiconductor physics is an…

In the modern physics unit included in the course curriculum of grade 10 physics introduced in the 2007-2008 education year, the aim is that students at this grade level are aware of any developments which constitute modern physics and may be considered new, and interpret whether mass, length and time values of the motions at any velocities close…

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…

Students' ability to effectively study for an exam, or to manage their time during an exam, is related to their metacognitive capacity. Prior research has demonstrated the effective use of metacognitive strategies during learning and retrieval is related to content expertise. Students also make judgments of their own learning and of problem…

Newton's second law is one of the cornerstones of the introductory physics curriculum, but it can still trouble a large number of students well after its introduction, hobbling their ability to apply the concept to problem solving and to related concepts, such as momentum, circular motion, and orbits. While there are several possibilities for…

A small number of studies have investigated student understanding of vector addition and subtraction in generic or introductory physics contexts, but in almost all cases the questions posed were in the vector arrow representation. In a series of experiments involving over 1000 students and several semesters, we investigated student understanding…