There are many factors that influence the ability to play with accurate intonation, and this Part 1 "Extending the Discussion" article provides background on string intonation, including the physics of intonation, the relationship between stringed instrument technique and intonation, and how students learn to play with accurate…

A method is described to measure the coefficient of restitution (COR) by dropping a ball on a piezoelectric disk. Multiple bounces can be observed at small drop heights, so the average COR over say ten bounces can be obtained from just one ball drop, without having to measure the bounce height or the bounce speed. The results show directly that…

One of the memories of my freshman year at Amherst was a lecture in the required physics/calculus course in which Arnold Arons quoted Isaac Newton on standing on the shoulders of giants. Now that I have spent my physics career, I still use the same quote, but now apply it to the eponymous apparatus that has been designed by the giants in our field.

Students have difficulty bridging the conceptual gap between Newtonian and relativistic physics, and, consequently, the teaching of special relativity has been discussed extensively in the literature. A comprehensive list of such references is too large to include, but a brief list is given. In this paper, the author presents several exercises,…

One of the easily accessible results in elementary fluid mechanics is the so-called Torricelli's theorem (or law), which states that the velocity U[subscript th] of the fluid exiting from an orifice at depth "h" from the free surface of a container filled with fluid, is the same as the velocity of a free-falling body from rest over a…

Fundamentals of Macroscopic Chemical Analysis is a newly developed foundation-level course that integrates concepts from traditional physical and analytical chemistry courses. The course was designed to serve majors in chemistry, biochemistry, and biology as well as pre-health professional students. The main goal of this course is to develop the…

When driving on a sunny day, one can sometimes observe a small solar spectrum in the rearview mirror of a vehicle. The formation of this "rainbow" results from the prism-like structure of the rearview mirror. Our investigation of this phenomenon reveals that the resulting spectrum is formed in a manner similar to the way a rainbow is…

Double-slit interference is a difficult phenomenon for students to grasp in an introductory physics course. A thorough understanding of constructive and destructive interference is critical, but even with such an understanding, visualizing exactly how an interference pattern is formed by light passing through two slits can still be a challenge for…

Writing and argumentation are critical to both professional physics and physics education. They are both necessary to the practices of professional science like paper writing and peer review, and are increasingly emphasized in science education standards and best practices. Despite this, the skill of making an extended argument in writing is often…

This chapter provides some elements that may be useful for teacher educators who wish to promote critical analysis in physics. Firstly, it is argued that conducting a critical analysis is useful for any text, whether highly debatable or not, in order to maximise its comprehension. It is suggested that you can give the students both a classic…

The German Physics Olympiad is an extracurricular science contest for students. Here, they have the opportunity to compete against other talented students, can do physics outside of school, and take a first step to more engagement in the domain. Yet, female students participate in the competition in fewer numbers and are disproportionally more…

This case study examined the characteristics of classroom discourse during physics lessons in two single-sex high school classes--a boys' vs. a girls' class. All lessons were taught by the same teacher and covered the same topics. For each class, six lessons were recorded, transcribed, and coded and the characteristics of the discussion were…

Contextual features of assessments can influence the ideas students draw from and the ways they assemble knowledge. We used a mixed-methods approach to explore how surface-level item context impacts student reasoning. In study 1, we developed an isomorphic survey to capture student reasoning about fluid dynamics, a crosscutting phenomenon, in two…

We investigated how the endorsement of gender stereotypes affects disciplinary identity across three different science-technology-engineering-mathematics (STEM) areas: physics, biology, and chemistry, and whether such relationship is mediated by self-concept constructs, such as self-efficacy and perceived academic control. Building on the…

Physics education has been identified as one of the public sectors that are mostly influenced by technological developments. This paper adopted the quasi-experimental pre- and post-test design to assess the effects of multimedia-aided technologies (MAT) on undergraduate students' performance in quantum physics (QP) at the University of Rwanda…