Practical work must be assessed in a way that will promote the development of key skills necessary for destinations beyond the physics school laboratory. This paper reports on a study which sought to find out teachers' views and practices on the assessment of Advanced Level ('A' level) physics students' practical work skills. Individual interviews…

Scientific abilities rubrics developed at Rutgers University are an assessment and self-assessment tool. They consist of tables, each representing a broad scientific ability (for example, "to collect and analyze data"), the listing of subabilities (for example, "independent and dependent variables are identified") and the…

Formative assessment (FA) is considered a powerful tool to enhance learning. However, there have been few studies addressing how the implementation of FA influences the development of inquiry skills so far. This research intends to determine the efficacy of teaching using FA in the development of students' inquiry skills. A test of inquiry skills…

This study examined the effects of school location on secondary school students' academic achievement in Physics based on the 5E learning cycle. The design of the study was a non-randomized pre-test, post-test control group quasi-experimental design. The population of the study was 66,345. Two hundred and forty-three students were sampled from six…

How to help teachers to design teaching plan for raising student's competency at secondary school in Laos is now of great concern. On the other hand, teachers teach sciences almost by lecturing theoretical only. They rarely explain the problems based on actual phenomena that occur in pupils' daily life nor do experiment during the class. Thus, one…

Free-response research-based assessments, like the Colorado Upper-division Electrostatics Diagnostic (CUE), provide rich, fine-grained information about students' reasoning. However, because of the difficulties inherent in scoring these assessments, the majority of the large-scale conceptual assessments in physics are multiple choice. To increase…

"Proceedings of International Conference on Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology" includes full papers presented at the International Conference on Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology (ICEMST) which took place on April 1-4, 2021 in Antalya, Turkey. The aim of the conference is to offer opportunities to share…

This article summarises the practical requirements for new science A-levels in biology, chemistry and physics for first teaching from September 2015. It discusses the background to how the new approach was reached and how OCR has seen this taking shape in our assessment models. The opportunities presented by this new approach to practical…

The physics curriculum is usually defined by content but this does not provide students with an authentic experience of the subject. An alternative is that physics is defined more as a way of thinking and this idea is explored in terms of the purposes of physics education, assessment and the relationship of the subject with other disciplines. A…

Conducting labs isn't a new way to teach physics, but labs have become increasingly prevalent with the rise of inquiry. Physics students collect mostly quantitative data, often represented by graphs or tables. Interpreting this data can be a challenge for students, especially when it comes to experimental error. To address this issue, this article…

Studies of high-school science course sequences have been limited primarily to a small number of site-specific investigations comparing traditional science sequences (e.g., Biology-Chemistry-Physics: BCP) to various Physics First-influenced sequences (Physics-Chemistry-Biology: PCB). The present study summarizes a five-year program evaluation…

Physical World is a one-semester course designed for elementary education majors, that integrates earth science, astronomy, and physics. The course is part of a four-course set that explores science concepts, processes, and skills, along with the nature of scientific practice, that are included in state and national standards for elementary school…

Investigations related to expertise in problem solving and ability to transfer learning from one context to another are important for developing strategies to help students perform more expertlike tasks. Here we analyze written responses to a pair of nonintuitive isomorphic problems given to introductory physics students and discussions with a…

We investigate short-term learning from hints and feedback in a Web-based physics tutoring system. Both the skill of students and the difficulty and discrimination of items were determined by applying item response theory (IRT) to the first answers of students who are working on for-credit homework items in an introductory Newtonian physics…

In a recent study we showed that physics students' problem-solving performance can depend strongly on problem representation, and that giving students a choice of problem representation can have a significant impact on their performance [ P. B. Kohl and N. D. Finklestein, Phys. Rev. ST. Phys. Educ. Res. 1, 010104 (2005) ] In this paper, we…