To address a perennial need to provide K-8 teachers with a solid foundation in science, there are many physics content courses throughout the United States. One such course is Physics and Astronomy for Teachers (PAT), which relies heavily on active-learning strategies. Although PAT is successful in teaching physics content, students sometimes…

Although there is a broad agreement among scientists and science educators that students should not only learn science, but also acquire some sense of its nature, it has been reported that undergraduate students possess an inadequate grasp of the nature of science (NOS). The study presented here examined the potential and effectiveness of Nobel…

Sixty-seven deaths per week, nine per day, one every two hours: Motor-vehicle crashes are the number one killer of teenagers in the United States, and although fatalities have declined in recent years, almost 3,500 teenagers still die every year in motor vehicle crashes (NHTSA 2011). In fact, 35% of all deaths among 16- to 19-year-olds are…

Biology students enrolled in a typical undergraduate physiology course encounter Poiseuille's law, a physics equation that describes the properties governing the flow of blood through the circulation. According to the equation, a small change in vessel radius has an exponential effect on resistance, resulting in a larger than expected change in…

The field of Physics Education Research (PER) seeks to investigate how students learn physics and how instructors can help students learn more effectively. The process by which learners create understanding about a complex physics concept is an active area of research. My study explores this process, using solar cells as the context. To understand…

Science education in the U.S. has failed for over a century to bring the experience of scientific induction to classrooms, from elementary science to undergraduate courses. The achievement of American students on international comparisons of science proficiency is unacceptable, and the disparities between groups underrepresented in STEM and others…

Each fall, the Statistical Research Center conducts the Survey of Enrollments and Degrees, which asks physics and astronomy departments to provide information on the number of students enrolled and the number of recent degree recipients conferred the previous academic year. This survey also asks for the names and contact information of their…

By the time people earn physics PhDs, they have learned a great deal about physics and how research is conducted. However, physics PhDs also develop skills and knowledge in a number of related areas, such as advanced mathematics, programming, modeling, and technical writing. New physics PhDs draw upon an arsenal of skills and knowledge in their…

The method of competences level automated management is developed for student's competences formation. An insufficient level of schools graduates in physics is identified as the modern problem of the education. Teacher does not specify which step in a solution a student can not cope with, and the student reiterates his mistake in other tasks…

The popularity and importance of distance education (DE) have increased along with advances in information and communication technologies. Many educational institutions now use DE applications. Today, as the importance of scientific literacy rises, the integration of DE into science education has become obligatory. At this point, this study seeks…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of strategic problem solving with peer instruction on college students' performance in physics. The students enrolled in 2 sections of a physics course were studied; 1 section was the treatment group and the other section was the comparison group. Students in the treatment group received peer…

Students often have difficulties understanding abstract physics concepts, such as solid friction. This study examines high school students' mental models of solid friction through a case study of 215 high school students in the ninth through twelfth grades. An achievement test with three open-ended questions was created, with questions limited to…

This study was performed to investigate the effects of live virtual classroom on students' achievement and to determine students' opinions about the live virtual physics classroom at distance learning. 63 second-year Distance Computer Education & Instructional Technology students enrolled in this study. At the live virtual physics classroom,…

This paper describes investigative homework with apples, aiming to contribute to the primary-school students' understanding of density and conditions leading to floating and sinking. The assignment represents an opportunity for individual autonomous learning of physics and adoption of established scientific concepts through practical activities…

The aim of this study is to draw attention to the informal education aspect of the movies shown and to determine the awareness levels about physics in movies of a small group composed of university students. That is an evaluation had been made among the films dealing explicitly with the basic content of physics, except for science fiction movies,…