The goals for lab instruction are receiving critical attention in the physics education community due to multiple reports and research findings. In this paper, we describe a theoretically motivated scheme to evaluate instructional lab curricula and apply that scheme to three implementations of an electricity and magnetism lab curriculum. The…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] Although curriculum design has a long tradition in physics education research (PER), it is often criticized for unclear or inconsistent methodologies. One reason is that the theory-into-practice aspect frequently remains blurred. Only a few curriculum…

The basic concepts inherent to statics, including unbalanced and balanced forces and instability and stability of physical systems, have traditionally been covered in middle and high school physical science courses (Physical Science as indicated in "Next Generation Science Standards"). Yet, these concepts are covered using a physical…

With the developing technology educating students free from misconceptions, making sense of their learnings and using them in daily life are primarily aimed. This research is designed not only for teaching "work, energy and power" concepts and the relationships among them but also for investigating the effects of the teaching on…

Geodesy is a very active and essential research discipline in geophysics but it is not a commonly studied subject at the secondary school or junior post-secondary levels. Far more frequently, gravity and gravitational acceleration are discussed, to some extent, in elementary kinematics or classical mechanics courses. This often takes the form of…

The popularization of the STEM educational model has also brought along the need for well-trained teachers. In this model, it is aimed to understand examples in real world and solve related problems. Of course, this depends on the development of critical thinking, creative thinking, researching and experimental skills. For these reasons, the…

Graphs are often used to represent mathematical functions, to illustrate data from social and natural sciences, or to specify scientific theories. With increasing emphasis on the development of scientific research skills, the work with graphs and data interpretation are gaining in importance. The research involved an eye-tracking experiment…

In this study, the spring constant was determined within the scope of Hooke's law. For this purpose, an Arduino MEGA, an HC-SR04 Ultrasonic Distance Sensor, and a 1 kg Load Cell Mass Sensor was used. Sensors and microprocessor are mounted on a plane. One end of the spring is mounted on the force sensor, and a wooden rod, perceived by the distance…

This work describes the construction of a small-scale radio telescope using open source hardware technologies which can be used as a tool in the training of engineers and physicists, as well as in the dissemination of important technologies for space weather monitoring studies, security of radio communication networks and maintenance of essential…

This article reports the results of an empirical study exploring the discourses of physics teacher educators. We ask how the expressed understandings of a physics teacher education programme in the talk of teacher educators potentially support the identity construction of new teachers. Nine teacher educators from different sections of a physics…

This study uses positional analysis to describe the student interaction networks in four research-based introductory physics curricula. Positional analysis is a technique for simplifying the structure of a network into blocks of actors whose connections are more similar to each other than to the rest of the network. This method describes social…

Recruiting high-quality physics teachers for low-socioeconomic status (SES) schools is essential for ensuring equity but is challenging globally. China launched a four-year program to meet the challenge by providing free education and stipends and promising a career position to attract high-performance secondary graduates, while using a contract…

The study examined the influence of time-of-day of instruction on students' performance in physics.The study was a descriptive research and 578 senior secondary two (SS II) students were randomly selected from twenty co-educational public secondary schools based on the time-of-day physics.Proforma, questionnaire and physics lesson timetable were…

Work, as a concept, is often encountered in daily life, but the meaning of work in physics is closely related to power, force, and energy. Studies made about various concepts and subjects have proved that using words in ways different from their scientific meanings has a negative effect on teaching, and causes conceptual complexities and/or…

In this work we discuss the intricacies of a simulation using the MS Excel spreadsheet that allows to study in detail the process of heat transfer between two reservoirs at different temperatures through a conducting rod when heat losses are neglected. The proposed physical model computes the time dependence of the reservoir temperatures and…