The development of learning practices that enable students to transfer knowledge across contexts, is a dominant topic in Physics Education Research. Assessment is a key activity in the learning process. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the value of analysing introductory physics assessments using the Semantics dimension of Legitimation…

Introductory physics lab courses serve as the starting point for students to learn and experience experimental physics at the undergraduate level. They often focus on measurement uncertainty, an essential topic for practicing physicists and a foundation for more advanced lab learning. As such, measurement uncertainty has been a focus when studying…

Persistence is an important part of student success--both in and out of school. To enhance persistence, we first need to assess it accurately. Digital games can be used as vehicles for measuring and enhancing persistence. The purpose of this study is to test the effects of (a) game-level characteristics (i.e., game mechanics and conceptual…

Renewable energy is a trending topic due to its importance in today's society especially because of global warming. Because of its importance, this topic should be discussed at schools in an inclusive education environment. Experimental work is a very good activity to provide students effective conceptual discussions, but it is necessary to…

Experiments using smartphones allow for teaching physics concepts in a fun and engaging way and including interdisciplinary approaches. The exploratory character of the experimental activities, along with the smartphones' embedded technologies, when applied in the high school classroom, also has the potential to awake the students' intrinsic…

Experimental teaching is essential for a good understanding of science, especially on Physics. Practical activities play an important role for engaging students with science, mainly when they interact directly with equipment, collect experimental data with computers and/or use interactive software for data analysis. In this work, we present the…

Supersonic free-fall jumps are excellent examples of kinematics in the context of drag. They have attracted a lot of media, public, and scientific interest. In 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from a height of approximately 38.969 km. During his flight he reached a top speed of 373 m/s, becoming the first human to travel faster than the speed of…

We describe the design and implementation of a teaching-learning sequence that was started before the lockdown and was then transformed for distance teaching. A backward design approach was adopted in order to identify clear learning outcomes. The activities were outlined according to an inquiry-based learning paradigm, referring to research-based…

With the negative impact of COVID-19 on educational activities, face-to-face education was suspended at universities and distance education was replaced with it. The aim of this study is to determine whether the students learned some concepts related to the subject of "radioactivity" taught by emergency remote education (ERE) and to…

Persistence is an important part of student success--both in and out of school. To enhance persistence, we first need to assess it accurately. Digital games can be used as vehicles for measuring and enhancing persistence. The purpose of this study is to test the effects of (a) game-level characteristics (i.e., game mechanics and conceptual…

Due to the challenges of the new era teachers enrich their teaching approaches with the implementation of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) tools. Worldwide literature provides solid evidence underlying the potential of technology for supporting everyday teaching practice, providing an interactive teaching and learning environment.…

This chapter compares two teachers' definitional practices in two Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) lessons, i.e. physics and history, which are taught in English in Finland. It adopts Dalton-Puffer's (Eur J Appl Linguistics 1(2):216-253, 2013; Cognitive discourse functions: specifying an integrative interdisciplinary construct. In:…

Transfer is not static but a dynamic process of learning. In this article, the concept of transfer and the implications of its study are reconsidered from the theoretical basis of the complex dynamic system approach. We describe "transfer" as an emergent process that implies not a copy of knowledge applied to a new situation, but a new…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] This paper proposes the rethinking of the division of labor between physics education research curriculum developers and classroom instructors. Historically, both curriculum developers and instructors have taken responsibility for fostering students'…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Fifteen years ago, following recommendations from research on science education for prospective teachers and for students more broadly, "Physics and Everyday Thinking" introduced activities within an inquiry-based undergraduate physics course…