We believe that a natural focus of the physics education research community is on understanding and improving students' learning in our physics courses. Due to the increase in technology, we can bring laboratory experiments closer to our students. It is necessary to update our laboratories technologically to get closer to the world in which our…

It's not surprising that rainbows have received a great deal of attention: in textbooks, in magazines, and on the web. They are, after all, beautiful, fascinating, occasionally awe-inspiring, even a little mysterious. They are an almost perfect blend of natural beauty and simple physics. Has everything that can be said about rainbows already been…

The principles of chemical kinetics comprise one of the core topics that appear throughout chemistry. Standard kinetics lessons typically cover reaction rates and relative rates, rate laws, integrated rate laws, half-lives, collision theory, and the Arrhenius equation. They can also introduce a discussion of mechanisms as well, which may be the…

Adequate sleep is essential for students to be able to solve challenging problems effectively. After many years of advising students to get enough sleep the night before their final exam, two studies were conducted with students in introductory physics classes to investigate their sleep habits. In the first previously published study, few students…

Teaching and learning of quantum physics at secondary level is an active field of research. One important challenge is finding ways to promote understanding of quantum concepts without the mathematical formalism that is embedded in quantum mechanics but unavailable on the secondary level. We investigated Norwegian secondary students' (N = 291)…

Learning assistants (LAs) play an important role in inquiry-oriented physics instruction in large classrooms. LAs increase the teacher-student ratio and provide timely support to student exploration. Questioning is believed to be an advantageous strategy for LAs to scaffold student learning and maintain students as the agent of knowledge…

Limiting case analysis (LCA) is important to practicing physicists. Yet, there is little concrete guidance for physics educators, and a lack of consensus in the research community about how to help students learn, and learn from, limiting case analysis. In this study, we first review existing literature to find commonalities and variations in how…

Recently Burkholder "et al." argued that class normalized gains over the entire population of courses is approximated by a Cauchy distribution, not by a normal distribution, and therefore should not be used to compare different classes because means and standard deviations cannot be calculated. They argued that multiple linear regression…

Even after research-based instruction, students who demonstrate the ability to assemble relevant conceptual knowledge on one physics question may have difficulty assembling that same knowledge on a closely related problem. Recent research has suggested that reflexive, bottom-up reasoning processes seemingly unrelated to the physics concepts…

The topic of Direct current is one of the areas where the physics students' lack of deep understanding was identified. The aim of the research was to examine the effect of the blended learning approach on students' motivation for learning physics. The sample included 128 upper-secondary school students from Novi Sad (Serbia) with an average age of…

This study examines and describes how various online remote laboratory courses, necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, were implemented at Hankuk University in Korea in 2020. We compared four general undergraduate laboratory courses, one each for physics, chemistry, biology, and earth science, and two major-level laboratory courses taught during…

A robust knowledge of physics entails deeply understanding electricity concepts such as conductivity and resistance. Understanding how circuits work is also critical for ensuring the safe use of electrical technology such as car batteries and downed powerlines. Curricular materials covering these content ideas are readily available for teachers.…

The notion of science identity has been widely discussed in the field of science education in recent years. Many research studies have focused on students' science identity in a general sense in spite of the fact that students are usually exposed to discipline-specific science courses in high school. We argue that it is more appropriate to explore…

This study aims to ascertain academicians' opinions about out-of-school learning, awareness of it, and competency to plan learning activities in such situations for the purpose of teaching in out-of-school learning environments (OSLEs). The research group of this study, which was conducted as a case study, consists of 56 academics in the physics,…

The motivational beliefs of students, who were mainly bioscience majors interested in careers in health professions, in mandatory large introductory level algebra-based physics courses were surveyed. Although female students outnumbered male students in these courses, they had lower physics motivational beliefs including self-efficacy and identity…