Oscillatory motion with damping proportional to the velocity is part of all upper-class physics courses and some introductory courses; however, the emphasis is primarily on the free amplitude decay. Microelectromechanical (MEMs) accelerometers allow the acceleration to be directly measured and the velocity and displacement to be derived from it.…

We describe the development and in-class evaluation of a quantum interactive learning tutorial (QuILT) on quantum key distribution, a context which involves an exciting application of quantum mechanics. The protocol used in the QuILT described here uses single photons with nonorthogonal polarization states to generate a random shared key over a…

Models that are used to predict and explain phenomena related to molecular vibration and rotation are ubiquitous in physical chemistry, and are of importance in many related fields. Yet, little work has been done to characterize student use and application of these models. We describe the results of a multi-year, multi-institutional qualitative…

This study aimed to expand PDEODE*E Tasks with the Think-Pair-Share model for reconstructing students' misconceptions on work and energy. The PDEODE*E Tasks with Think-Pair-Share model implemented for students who had not taught the concept of work and energy. The participants include 36 students of tenth grade (22 girls and 14 boys, whose ages…

Multimedia pedagogical agents are on-screen characters that allow users to navigate or learn in multimedia environments. Several agents' characteristics may moderate their instructional effectiveness, including appearance, gender, nonverbal communication, motion, and voice. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis to test hypotheses from diverse…

Traditional school laboratory exercises on a system of moving objects connected by strings involve deriving expressions for the system acceleration, a = (?F)/m, and sketching a graph of acceleration vs. force. While being in the form of rational functions, these expressions present great opportunities for broadening the scope of the analysis by…

PEOE (predict, explain, observe, explain) is a strategy that supports conceptual change (Dial et al. 2009). "Conceptual change" is a process through which students can change their understandings, ideas, or beliefs (diSessa 1993; Konicek-Moran and Keeley 2015). This style of lesson allows students to express their scientific ideas…

Resources theory assumes that resource activation is context sensitive, and that an important dimension of context is the question students are answering. The context sensitivity of resource activation has been demonstrated empirically by case studies that show students using different resources to answer questions that are similar in focus. In…

Spontaneous motion is one of the most basic event types, but different languages use varying patterns to express it. For example, English usually encodes path information in prepositional phrases or adverbial particles, while Korean maps path information onto verbs (Talmy, 1985). This study predicts that this typological difference would affect…

Early in their study of one-dimensional kinematics, my students build an algebraic model that describes the effects of a rolling ball's (perpendicular) collision with a wall. The goal is for the model to predict the ball's velocity when it returns to a fixed point approximately 50-100 cm from the wall as a function of its velocity as it passes…

During the Thai high-school physics teacher training programme, we used an aluminum loop-the-loop system built by the Institute for the Promotion of Teaching Science and Technology (IPST) to demonstrate a circular motion and investigate the concept of the conservation of mechanical energy. There were 27 high-school teachers from three provinces,…

Background: Children are not blank slates when they begin school; they bring prior conceptions about the everyday world with them. These conceptions usually do not comply with accepted scientific views and have to be changed within the process of education. However, to do this effectively more needs to be known about the relationship between the…

We present a nontrigonometric graphical method for predicting the trajectory of a projectile when the angle and initial velocity are known. Students enrolled in a general education conceptual physics course typically have weak backgrounds in trigonometry, making inaccessible the standard analytical calculation of projectile range. Furthermore,…

A controlled experiment was conducted on the effects of two types of animation--motion and highlighting--on learning. The treatment consisted of a 3.5 minute multimedia presentation that described the workings of a flushing toilet tank. A 2x2 factorial design ({motion, no-motion} x {highlight, no-highlight}) was employed with two dependent…

Using hand gestures is a great way to get students engaged in learning and more focused on reading comprehension strategies. This article presents descriptions of simple hand motions that teachers can use to help their students predict, question, clarify, and summarize while reading.