We describe a study on the conceptual difficulties faced by college students in understanding hydrodynamics of ideal fluids. This study was based on responses obtained in hundreds of written exams complemented with several oral interviews, which were held with first-year engineering and science university students. Their responses allowed us to…

Interdisciplinary teaching is a teaching method that is not as easy as other teaching methods to integrate into the everyday school schedule. This paper serves as an example and gives explanations on how this didactic approach can be applied. The lessons described were conducted successfully with a Year 11 class at a secondary school in which the…

We examine changes in students' rating behavior during a semester-long sequence of peer evaluation laboratory exercises in an introductory mechanics course. We perform a quantitative analysis of the ratings given by students to peers' physics lab reports, and conduct interviews with students. We find that peers persistently assign higher ratings…

In this paper, we show data from the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey that suggests that Georgetown physics majors become increasingly expert in their attitudes towards physics learning and knowing after taking a course that combines two reformed curricula, Matter and Interactions (M&I) and Tutorials in Introductory Physics…

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to explore how Chinese preschool children categorize plants into either living or nonliving things. The research was framed within the interpretive paradigm and was designed as a descriptive, cross-sectional study. Participants were children 4 to 6 years of age from 3 kindergartens in Jiangsu…

This paper reports on a study to determine whether blind students' conceptualizations of force and motion differ from sighted students. This is particularly concerned with the question of whether the students' visual experiences have any relation to their conceptualizations or misconceptualization about force and motion. The research was designed…

Background: A substantial review study of concept cartoons reports that few studies have indicated their functions. For this reason, the present study illuminates the extent to which concept cartoon-embedded worksheets (through constructivist context) accomplish these functions in conceptual learning. Purpose: The purpose of the study is to…

Reversing the traditional classroom activities, in the flipped classroom model students view lectures at home and perform activities during class period inside the classroom. This study investigated the effect of a flipped classroom implementation on college physics students' motivation and understanding of kinematics graphs. A Solomon four-group…

The aim of this study was to identify challenges in implementing a physics-before- 10 mathematics curriculum. Obviously, students need to learn necessary mathematics skills in order to develop advanced physics knowledge. In the 2010 high school curriculum in Taiwan, however, grade 11 science students study two-dimensional motion in physics without…

Meaningful learning requires the integration of cognitive and affective learning with the psychomotor, i.e., hands-on learning. The undergraduate chemistry laboratory is an ideal place for meaningful learning to occur. However, accurately characterizing students' affective experiences in the chemistry laboratory can be a very difficult task. While…

Thought Experiments are powerful tools in both scientific thinking and in the teaching of science. In this study, the historical Thought Experiment (TE) "Newton's Cannon" was used as a tool to teach concepts relating to the motion of satellites to students at upper secondary level. The research instruments were: (a) a…

Educators must address several challenges inherent to the instruction of scientific disciplines such as physics -- expensive or insufficient laboratory equipment, equipment error, difficulty in simulating certain experimental conditions. Augmented reality (AR) can be a promising approach to address these challenges. In this paper, we discuss the…

The study was conducted to show the effectiveness of concept mapping as a teaching strategy to undergraduate students taking introductory physics course. A number of researchers have investigated the effectiveness of concept mapping on student academic achievement. The main focus of these studies have been on comparing the effectiveness of concept…

This study investigated elementary students' explanations for the daily patterns of apparent motion of the Sun, Moon, and stars. Third-grade students were chosen for this study because this age level is at the lower end of when many US standards documents suggest students should learn to use the Earth's rotation to explain daily celestial motion.…

This work is an attempt to see how physics undergraduates view the basic ideas of general relativity when they are exposed to the topic in a standard introductory course. Since the subject is conceptually and technically difficult, we adopted a "case studies" approach, focusing in depth on about six students who had just finished a one semester…