We studied the use of online molecular dynamics simulations (MD) to enhance student abilities to understand the atomic processes governing plastic deformation in materials. The target population included a second-year undergraduate engineering course in the School of Materials Engineering at Purdue University. The objectives of the study were to…

Digital games are very popular in modern culture. The authors are examining ways to leverage these engaging environments to assess and support student competencies. The authors examine gameplay and learning using a physics game they developed called Newton's Playground. The sample consisted of 167 eighth- and ninth-grade students who played…

This article investigates the influence of English as the examination language on the solution of physics and science problems by non-native speakers in tertiary engineering education. For that purpose, a statistically significant total number of 96 students in four year groups from freshman to senior level participated in a testing experiment in…

This study explores students' self-perceptions across science subjects (biology, chemistry, and physics) by gender and underrepresented minority group membership. The data are drawn from the Persistence Research in Science and Engineering (PRiSE) project, which surveyed 7,505 students (enrolled in college English courses required for all majors)…

This study investigated the online process of reading and the offline learning from an illustrated science text. The authors examined the effects of using a concrete or abstract picture to illustrate a text and adopted eye-tracking methodology to trace text and picture processing. They randomly assigned 59 eleventh-grade students to 3 reading…

In this dissertation, I perform and compare three studies of introductory biology students' classroom expectations--what students expect to be the nature of the knowledge that they are learning, what they think they should be (or are) doing in order to learn, and what they think they should be (or are) doing in order to be successful. Previous…

Energy concepts are fundamentally important for describing and analyzing systems ranging from subatomic particles to spiral galaxies. In general, students first encounter such concepts in introductory courses that typically focus on forms of energy, energy transfer, and conservation laws. Within these courses, conservation of mechanical energy is…

Students learn new abstract concepts best when these concepts are connected through a well-designed analogy, to familiar ideas. Since the concept of the relativistic spacetime distance is highly abstract, it would be desirable to connect it to the familiar Euclidean distance, but present the latter in such a way that it makes a transparent contact…

In a recent note, the author presented a derivation of Faraday's law of electromagnetic induction for a closed filamentary circuit C(t) which is moving at relativistic velocities and also changing its shape as it moves via the magnetic vector potential. Recently, Kholmetskii et al, while correcting an error in an equation, showed that it can be…

Excellent senior high school physics teachers are the backbone power in the new course reform of physics in China. The excellent senior high school physics teachers' professional growth actuality in Shandong is surveyed in this article by the self-made "Questionnaire of Excellent Senior High School Physics Teachers' Professional Growth",…

Students often make errors when trying to solve qualitative or conceptual physics problems, and while many successful instructional interventions have been generated to prevent such errors, the process of deduction that students use when solving physics problems has not been thoroughly studied. In an effort to better understand that reasoning…

In the study of kinematics it is often emphasized that freefall time is independent of particular parabolic trajectory, provided that the initial velocity is parallel to the horizontal plane. There are various experiments to prove features of freefall in textbooks and other literature. Using a PC one can make precise measurements of time intervals…

In this article some basic laboratory bench experiments are described that are useful for teaching high school students some of the basic principles of stellar astrophysics. For example, in one experiment, students slam a plastic water-filled bottle down onto a bench, ejecting water towards the ceiling, illustrating the physics associated with a…

A vane-type low-cost laboratory model anemometer cum power meter is designed and constructed for measuring low wind energy created from accelerating fluids. The constructed anemometer is a device which records the electrical power obtained by the conversion of wind power using a wind sensor coupled to a DC motor. It is designed for its…

We present simple apparatus designed to help Thai high school students visualize the directions of frictional forces. Bristles of toothbrushes, paintbrushes and scrubbing brushes are used to demonstrate the frictional forces acting in a variety of situations. These demonstrations, when followed by discussion of free-body diagrams, were found to be…