In this article, we develop critiques of the pipeline model which dominates Western science education policy, using discourse analysis of interviews with two Swedish young women focused on "identity work". We argue that it is important to unpack the ways that the pipeline model fails to engage with intersections of gender, ethnicity,…

Students' difficulties in quantum mechanics may be the result of unproductive framing and not a fundamental inability to solve the problems or misconceptions about physics content. We observed groups of students solving quantum mechanics problems in an upper-division physics course. Using the lens of epistemological framing, we investigated four…

Laboratory courses represent a unique and potentially important component of the undergraduate physics curriculum, which can be designed to allow students to authentically engage with the process of experimental physics. Among other possible benefits, participation in these courses throughout the undergraduate physics curriculum presents an…

Introducing new physics phenomena through inquiry labs has been a staple of the successful physics teacher for years. Introducing new vocabulary through lab work, however, is less common. This paper offers an example of a simple and short lab that does just that, and one that I have found to be quite useful in my college prep physics courses to…

The year 2014 marked the four-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Galileo's birth, making it the perfect occasion to present and illustrate a GeoGebra applet which reproduces some of Galileo's celebrated experiments on the uniformly accelerated motion, as reported on in "Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New…

Using a conventional notation for representing forces on diagrams, students were presented with questions on the interaction between two objects. The results show that complete understanding of Newton's Third Law of Motion is quite rare, and that some problems relate to misunderstanding which force acts on each body. The use of the terms…

Homework is an important component of most physics courses. One of the functions it serves is to provide meaningful formative assessment in preparation for examinations. However, correlations between homework and examination scores tend to be low, likely due to unproductive student behavior such as copying and random guessing of answers. In this…

The concepts of electricity and magnetism in physics are complex and demanding to learn because their meaning builds through several different phenomenological areas. Each of the phenomenological areas adds a certain facet of the meaning of the concept. All standard physics textbooks discuss at least 1) force, 2) energy and work, and 3) electric…

Assessment of student learning outcomes (SLOs) has become increasingly important in higher education. Meaningful assessment (i.e., assessment that leads to the improvement of student learning) is impossible without faculty engagement. We argue that one way to elicit genuine faculty engagement is to embrace the disciplinary differences when…

In this research, we gave to technical university students (N=50) and high school students (N=75) a verbally described situation of a partially defined physics problem. The task for the both groups of the students was to generate drawings of how they imagined the situation that the problem referred to. A fully abstract drawing was generated by 48%…

In this work, we present a pedagogical strategy to describe the diffraction phenomenon based on a didactic adaptation of the Feynman's path integrals method, which uses only high school mathematics. The advantage of our approach is that it allows to describe the diffraction in a fully quantum context, where superposition and probabilistic aspects…

Using the National Center of Education Statistics' Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), this report analyzes data on Native American recipients of bachelor's degrees among 16 physical science and engineering fields. Overall, Native Americans are earning physical science and engineering bachelor's degrees at lower rates than the…

Over the past decade, peer instruction and the introduction of student response systems has provided a means of improving student engagement and achievement in large-lecture settings. While the nature of the student discourse occurring during peer instruction is less understood, existing studies have shown student ideas about the subject,…

More knowledge of how the actual design of the laboratory work influence students' communication, is needed to design and implement physics laboratory work lessons. The aim with this quantitative research, conducted at a Swedish upper secondary school, was to explore how the design of the laboratory work affects students' communication. Twenty…

The learning and instruction process in Pakistan is geared around teacher-centered activities. This research aimed at involving high school students in an interactive online learning experience and to explore the acquiring of scientific argumentation skills through this online engagement. The secondary objective of the study was to investigate the…