This study examined the self-efficacy of Turkish Cypriot science teachers working at high schools in Northern Cyprus. The study sample was 200 science teachers who participated in the survey. The Teacher Self-Efficacy (TSE) Scale was used as a data source. It was observed that the science teachers' efficacy beliefs about student engagement in…

This article empirically studies the impact of bilingualism on educational achievements. This relationship has been thoroughly studied in a number of countries around the world, but not in Russia. We used a sample of 709 ethnic Tatar school students aged 15-16 (in the ninth grade) in the spring of the year 2010. We found a positive significant…

In this article the author takes as a point of departure certain discursive practices employed by physicists credited with popularizing the field of quantum mechanics in order to posit the relationship between space, learning, and the perception of pedagogical realities as trans-local phenomena. More specifically, through this article the author…

The purpose of this article is to give the intelligible procedure for undergraduate students to grasp proof of the fact that the magnetic field outside the hollow superconducting sphere (superconducting shell) coincides with the field of a point magnetic dipole both when an uniform external magnetic field is applied as when a ferromagnetic sphere…

As part of a biomechanics course aimed at both upper-division Biology and Physics majors, this laboratory exercise introduces students to the ingenious ways in which organisms vary the composition and form of support and defensive structures such as bone and shell to maximize their strength while minimizing the energetic cost needed to produce…

Students often wrestle unsuccessfully with the task of correctly calculating momentum probability densities and have difficulty in understanding their interpretation. In the case of a particle in an "infinite" potential well, its momentum can take values that are not just those corresponding to the particle's quantised energies but…

While I was co-teaching an introductory course in musical acoustics a few years ago, our class investigated several pieces of equipment designed for audio purposes. One piece of such equipment was a pair of noise-canceling headphones. Our students were curious as to how these devices were in eliminating background noise and whether they indeed…

Some of the results from the electrostatics portion of introductory physics are particularly difficult for students to understand and/or believe. For students who have yet to take vector calculus, Gauss's law is far from obvious and may seem more difficult than Coulomb's. When these same students are told that the minimum potential…

A rattleback is a well-known physics toy that has a preferred direction of rotation. If it is spun about a vertical axis in the "wrong" direction, it will slow down, start rocking from end to end, and then spin in the opposite (i.e. preferred) direction. Many articles have been written about rattlebacks. Some are highly mathematical and…

Gel electrophoresis, used by geneticists and forensic experts alike, is an immensely popular technique that utilizes an electric field to separate molecules and proteins by size and charge. At the microscopic level, a dye or complex protein like DNA is passed through agarose, a gelatinous three-dimensional matrix of pores and nano-sized tunnels.…

Abbreviated expressions for enzyme kinetic expressions, such as the Michaelis-Menten (M-M) equations, are based on the premise that enzyme concentrations are low compared with those of the substrate and product. When one does progress experiments, where the solute is consumed during conversion to form a series of products, the idealized conditions…

In a previous paper that focused on the transmission of periodic waves at the boundary between two media, we documented difficulties with the basic concepts of wavelength, frequency, and propagation speed, and with the relationship v=f[lambda]. In this paper, we report on student attempts to apply this relationship in problems involving two-source…

This paper presents a comparative study of the thermal efficiencies of mechanical heat engines by using a graphical approach based on the pressure-volume ("P-V") diagram. Three types of idealized thermodynamic cycles--the Otto, the Diesel and the Brayton--are compared in pairs. Given the same temperature range within which the engines…

By introducing the mathematical concept of orientation, the significance of the minus sign in Faraday's law may be made clear to students with some knowledge of vector calculus. For many students, however, the traditional approach of treating the law as a relationship between positive scalars and of relying on Lenz's law to provide the information…

The use of the web in teaching and learning and research studies on this issue are increasingly common in science education. In most of these studies, teachers' and students' perceptions of and their attitudes toward the specific web-assisted/based learning activities and the effects of these activities on their achievement and attitudes have been…