The study covers the development and testing of the alternative mechanics survey (AMS), a modified force concept inventory (FCI), which used automatically marked free-response questions. Data were collected over a period of three academic years from 611 participants who were taking physics classes at high school and university level. A total of…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Instructional labs: Improving traditions and new directions.] Uncertainty is an important concept in physics laboratory instruction. However, little work has examined how students reason about uncertainty beyond the introductory (intro) level. In this work we aimed to compare intro and beyond-intro…

Social learning, the ability to perceive, interpret, and assess the behavior of one's peers, is crucial for forming meaningful relationships and succeeding in various learning environments. Yet, the rise of online and hybrid settings poses new challenges to socialization. Here, we study the social interactions among 191 high school physics…

The opportunity to innovate, experiment, and take chances in the classroom should be accessible to all students regardless of the social identities they hold; however, white women and women of color (WOC) in male-dominated physics, engineering, math and computer science (PEMC) learning environments, and STEM broadly, have been expected to take…

Dissertation introductions (DIs) have received on-going attention because they are considered to be the most challenging and difficult part of an academic text for graduate students, particularly for non-native English speakers (NNES). However, research that has investigated DIs written by native English speakers (NES) and by NNES, particularly…

Integrating computational thinking (CT) into STEM disciplines requires secondary teachers to develop their pedagogical content knowledge of computing and content integration. Experienced teachers who choose to integrate CT in their secondary STEM courses may struggle in the same ways as novice teachers as they learn about programming and its…

Physics is an essential subject in most fields of Science and Engineering which cannot be mastered simply by watching lectures or solving problems at the end of each chapter: students must fully engage in solving these problems. This often requires problem visualisation, which presents quite a challenge for some, especially for students who are…

Higher education physics has long been a field with a disproportionately skewed representation in terms of gender, class, and ethnicity. Responding to this challenge, this study explores the trajectories of "unexpected" (i.e., demographically under-represented) students into higher education physics. Based on timeline-guided life-history…

Most, if not all, physics undergraduate degree programs include instructional lab experiences. Physics lab instructors, both faculty and staff, are instrumental to student learning in instructional physics labs. However, the faculty-staff dichotomy belies the complex, varied, and multifaceted landscape of positions that lab instructors hold in the…

Much of the focus of international comparative studies of students' achievement has been on New Zealand students' falling standards. Using the most recent findings from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and, in particular, Year 9 New Zealand students' performance in specific items, this article suggests that there…

Research has highlighted difficulties experienced by students when studying quantum physics in introductory courses. In this paper, we present a teaching and learning sequence (TLS) aiming at introducing a quantum model of emission and absorption of radiation and we assess its impact on the students' learning about atomic spectra. The TLS has been…

Identifying and understanding student difficulties with physics content in a wide variety of topical areas is an active research area within the physics education research community. Of particular value are investigations of physics topics that appear multiple times in different contexts across the undergraduate physics curriculum. As these common…

Although lab activities play an important role in physics teaching, many of these activities do not attain the expected objectives. Many reasons can be advanced for this, such as a lack of apparatus/equipment in schools, limits to the lab time allocated, teachers' lack of knowledge and skills about lab-oriented teaching methods or the teachers'…

Reflecting in written form on one's teaching enactments has been considered a facilitator for teachers' professional growth in university-based preservice teacher education. Writing a structured reflection can be facilitated through external feedback. However, researchers noted that feedback in preservice teacher education often relies on…

This research was conducted on students of two senior high schools in Jambi, Indonesia, where the two schools have almost the same characteristics but apply different cooperative learning models, namely the inquiry learning model and the Jigsaw learning model. The purpose of this study was to assess students' attitudes towards physics through the…