In the February 2017 issue of "The Physics Teacher," an article was presented that highlighted the importance of high school physics teachers in inspiring women in physics, particularly by recognizing them as being a "physics person." Drawing on data from over 900 female undergraduates in physics, the article showed that the…

A critical component of scientific reasoning is the consideration of alternative explanations. Recognizing that decades of cognitive psychology research have demonstrated that relative cognitive accessibility, or "what comes to mind," strongly affects how people reason in a given context, we articulate a simple "cognitive…

Teachers are expected to consider the implications of recommendations made in educational research. In-service teachers are primary actors who play a leading role in education, so their attitudes towards educational research and researchers are more important than those of pre-service or trainee teachers. This study aims to find out inservice…

Vietnam's Ministry of Education and Training has introduced educational reforms that require Vietnamese teachers to acquire new understanding and skills using information communication technology (ICT) to support teaching. However, there was little literature to guide Vietnamese teachers on how to achieve these goals. The research goals were to…

Contribution: There are many on-line resources available to learn about optics and photonics, but no assessment tools exist to evaluate the learning achievements. This paper presents an assessment framework whose validity has been proven on a course with over 70 engineering students. Background: There is evidence that on-line resources complement…

The trajectory of a projectile through the air is affected both by gravity and by aerodynamic forces. The latter forces can conveniently be ignored in many situations, even when they are comparatively large. For example, if a 145-g, 74-mm diameter baseball is pitched at 40 ms[superscript -1] (89.5 mph), it experiences a drag force of about 1.5 N.…

Before discussing more details of SI, we will summarize the essentials in a few tables that can serve as ready references. If a unit isn't listed in Tables I-IV, it is not part of SI or specifically allowed for use with SI. The units and symbols that are sufficient for most everyday applications are given in bold.

This article studies an activity in a Swedish preschool setting where children's elaborations and understandings of floating and sinking are central. In a Swedish preschool context, it is advocated by the National Agency for Education (2016) that different forms of knowledge and ways of learning are used within the institutions to form a coherent…

Constructivism was introduced to Vietnam through many ways such as workshops, books, the Internet, and so on. However, due to the lack of professional education, fundamental ideas of constructivist learning perhaps were missing or neglected through classroom activities. Furthermore, due to the influence of culture and society, Vietnamese…

The result of additive colors is always fascinating to young students. When we teach this topic to 14- to 16-year-old students, they do not usually notice we use maximum light quantities of red (R), green (G), and blue (B) to obtain yellow, magenta, and cyan colors in order to build the well-known additive color diagram of Fig. 1. But how about…

An earlier investigation found that the performance of advanced students in a quantum mechanics course did not automatically improve from midterm to final exam on identical problems even when they were provided the correct solutions and their own graded exams. Here, we describe a study, which extended over four years, in which upper-level…

A cordless mouse with an added reed switch is used as a wireless data logger to record every time the wheel of a trolley completes a revolution. The limitations of the system in terms of maximum clicking rate and spatial resolution are considered and data obtained from the descent of a trolley down a ramp at various different angles is analysed in…

Critical thinking extends to all aspects of professional engineering, especially in technical development, and, since the introduction of the ABET 2000 criteria, there has been an increased emphasis in engineering education on the development of critical thinking skills. What is hoped for is that the students obtain critical thinking skills to…

Generally, cohorts or learning communities enrich higher learning in students. Learning communities consist of conventionally separate groups of students that meet together with common academic purposes and goals. Types of learning communities include paired courses with concurrent student enrollment, living-learning communities, and faculty…

This paper reports findings from a study of support provided by non-school-based mentors of secondary science teachers in England. It focuses on the identity development of beginning teachers of physics, some of the recipients of the mentoring. Drawing on the analysis of interview and case study data, and utilising third space theory, the authors…