Background: The representation of women in physics majors is persistently low despite ongoing calls for reforms to improve gender equality. This article builds upon prior research by applying the sociocognitive construct of self-determination in analysing women's experiences leading to their choice of physics study, along with factors affecting…

A way to promote student interest and engagement in physics is by capitalizing on students' skills in arts and crafts to design and make physics-based toys. This article illustrates how two students (averaging 14 years of age) in the authors' science class designed and fabricated a variation of a physics-based teaching aid that demonstrates the…

The Lawson classroom test of scientific reasoning is a quite popular and widely used tool that measures the level and development of the student's scientific reasoning skills. In this contribution, the results of this test for the N=446 students of the Faculty of Science Palacký University Olomouc from the years 2018-2020 at the beginning of their…

The Billotron is a device designed and built by the LPC Caen to illustrate the methods with which physicists are able to study the basic structure of matter, in particular the nucleus of the atom.

It is well known that "interactive engagement" helps students to understand basic concepts in physics. Performing experiments and analyzing measured data are effective ways to realize interactive engagement, in our view. Some experiments need special equipment, measuring instruments, or laboratories, but in this activity we advocate…

This article describes the redesign of a project-based course on soft and biological materials to include computational modeling. Including the construction of computational models in the course is described as a shift from constructivism--a theory that characterizes the development of formal reasoning, to constructionism--a theory that focuses on…

Effective faculty professional development must be participant centered; tailored to the needs and interests of the faculty who engage in it. In order to better understand those needs and interests, we investigate how knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and teaching practice vary among new physics faculty, using surveys of a large sample (n = 442) of…

Transfer of learning, the application of learning to different contexts over time, is important to all learning for development. As 21st century skills specifically aim to be "generic," there is an assumption that they can be transferred from context to context. We investigate the process of transfer in problem solving, with specific…

Hands-on projects have been widely used as alternative approaches for teaching and learning of science with direct practical experience on doing to promote students' development of 21st-century skills. Here, we present an implementation of hands-on projects into teaching and learning of magnetic field topic that corresponds with indicators and…

Several suggestions for the use of Mobile Phone (MP) sensors in science teaching are found in the literature, and most of them focus on proposing physics experiments that can be conducted with the aid of the sensors that commonly exist in smartphones. The proposed experiments rely on the Bring Your Own Devices (BYOD) approach, that is, students…

This paper describes the design process for a digital instructional sequence on introductory quantum physics for upper secondary education. Based on a collaboration between teachers and physics education researchers, this sequence incorporates relevant theoretical foundations from the field of science teaching to promote meaningful and conceptual…

It has been argued that the establishment of single-sex classes for females can increase their motivation and participation in physics. This paper reports on findings from a multi-occasional study among 90 female year 11 physics students across single-sex and co-educational high schools in Australia. The aim of this study was to identify the…

The dropout rate of university engineering studies is correlated with the absence of retention of freshman in the basic subjects. The aim of this work is to determine the effect of cooperative learning and the characteristics of students on learning, persistence, and academic performance. We have performed a study of learning, persistence and…

Concept inventories (CIs) are commonly used in pre-post instruction to study student conceptual change. For consistency in assessment interpretation, a CI's assessment construct is desired to maintain invariance across different test times. In this study, the longitudinal measurement invariance (LMI) analysis under the confirmatory factor analysis…

This article presents a possible framework for the cooperation of mathematics and physics education research domains. Moreover, the potential topics for such a scientific collaboration are explained by means of a structuring qualitative content analysis of current handbooks and conference proceedings in Germany and Vietnam. These topics can form a…