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…

The motion equations of a body under gravity and resistance linearly dependent on speed are usually analysed by solving differential equations. In this paper we report a derivation not explicitly involving differential equations but instead based on some elementary mathematical operations. The derivation uses only knowledge covered in a typical…

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…

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…

This study examined how students utilized metacognition while solving physics problems. A case study design was implemented, involving 30 11th-grade students. Data were collected by using open-ended physics problems, with a think-aloud strategy applied during the process. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted using the…

A holistic education should nurture a range of skills that are essential for thriving in a fast-changing world, including higher-order thinking skills. These skills are deeply intertwined with knowledge and many in the assessment community agree they should not be assessed in isolation. Curricula structured around long-established subject…

This paper shows how the freely downloadable software package called "SMath Studio" can be used to solve the time-independent Schrödinger equation using a simple step-wise approximation. The solution is illustrated with reference to the hydrogen atom for which trial eigenvalues are supplied by the energy level formula of the Bohr atom.

The main purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of Jigsaw-4 problem-solving instruction on preservice physics teachers' (PSPT) problem-solving skills in the college of teacher education in the Southern nation nationality region of Ethiopia. The study involves 136 first-year PSPTs who are attending their preservice teacher education…

This study investigated evidence of how students' mental models of fundamental kinematic relations evolved (i.e., developed cognitively over time) as observed during an introductory course in calculus-based classical mechanics. The core of the curriculum is based on a claim known as Galileo's principle of relativity. The course material comprised…

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,…

Previous work has looked at the relationship between high school preparation and student performance in calculus-based introductory mechanics (physics 1) courses. Here, we extend that work to look at performance in introductory calculus-based electricity and magnetism (physics 2), and we look at the significance of what college math courses have…

On August 16, 1960, at 7:12 a.m., United States Air Force Captain Joseph W. Kittinger Jr. looked out from his balloon gondola at a height of over 19 miles and… jumped. Kittinger's altitude and free-fall speed record lasted until Felix Baumgartner's jump from a height of nearly 24 miles on Oct. 14, 2012. Baumgartner broke several records, including…

The Chain Experiment competition has been held successfully for 6 years in Poland and is attracting growing interest. The competition provides participants with a task that involves designing and constructing a contraption that is an element in a chain of events that are based on various physical phenomena. The contraptions are then linked…

The law of conservation of momentum is a fundamental law of nature. It states that the momentum of an isolated system is conserved. In high school or introductory-level physics courses, for simplicity, teachers and textbooks always use collisions in one dimension as the examples to introduce the concept of conservation of momentum. To solve simple…

The aim of this research is to identify pre-service science teachers' experiences during the simple electrical circuit establishment process, points they were challenged with, and developed strategies they used against the challenges they were experimenting with this process. In this study, embedded single case study, which is one of the…