Numerous reports cite the need to improve the quality of undergraduate STEM education in order to attract and train a diverse pool of talented students prepared to meet the scientific and technological challenges of the 21st century. A growing body of research reveals that the nature and quality of science instruction in introductory college…

The aim of this study is to analyze the action research undertaken by Khan as a teacher researcher in a private school as part of the degree requirement of his M.Ed. program in Teacher Education at the Aga Khan University, Institute for Educational Development. The purpose of this analysis undertaken by the first author and supervisor of the study…

In this paper, we describe and discuss an information and communication technology (ICT)-based intervention designed to improve secondary school students' "revision" (in contrast to "learning") of physics concepts. We show that students' engagement in joint activities via our ICT-based intervention can provide them (and their…

Both harmonic oscillations and friction are the types of concepts in freshman physics that are readily applicable to the "real world" and as such, most students find these ideas interesting. Damped oscillations are usually presented with resistance proportional to velocity, which has the advantage of a relatively straightforward mathematical…

The toy model rocket is used extensively as an example of a realistic physical system. Teachers from grade school to the university level use them. Many teachers and students write computer programs to investigate rocket physics since the problem involves nonlinear functions related to air resistance and mass loss. This paper describes a nonlinear…

It is well-known that a party balloon can be made to fly erratically across a room, but it can also be used for quantitative measurements of other aspects of aerodynamics. Since a balloon is light and has a large surface area, even relatively weak aerodynamic forces can be readily demonstrated or measured in the classroom. Accurate measurements…

A coin tossed onto a table often ends up rolling in such a way that the center of mass remains approximately stationary. Although this phenomenon has been studied for many years and is well-documented in the literature, it is perhaps not widely appreciated in the physics education community that the motion can be understood without the use of…

The homotopy perturbation method is used to solve the nonlinear differential equation that governs the nonlinear oscillations of a simple pendulum, and an approximate expression for its period is obtained. Only one iteration leads to high accuracy of the solutions and the relative error for the approximate period is less than 2% for amplitudes as…

In spite of numerous calls for action, e.g., Executive Office of the President (2010), there have been few efforts nationally to promote engineering education in the elementary grades. Of these, hardly any have targeted underrepresented populations (National Academy of Engineering, 2009, p. 74). The collaboration described in this paper is a…

Self-regulation is the controlling of a process or activity by the students who are involved in Problem solving in Physics rather than by an external agency (Johnson, 2011). Selfregulated learning consists of three main components: cognition, metacognition, and motivation. Cognition includes skills necessary to encode, memorise, and recall…

Teachers' use of inquiry has been studied largely without regard for the disciplines in which teachers practice. As a result, there is no theoretical understanding of the possible role of discipline in shaping teachers' conceptions and enactment of inquiry. In this mixed-methods study, conceptions and enactment of inquiry for 60 National Board…

The present article is primarily targeted for the advanced college/university undergraduate students of chemistry/physics education, computational physics/chemistry, and computer science. The most recent software system such as MS Visual Studio .NET version 2010 is employed to perform computer simulations for modeling Bohr's quantum theory of…

This paper is a brief summary of an "open-ended" physics experiment that gave my students a glimpse of what real physics research is like. They found it to be both fun and challenging. The subject of the experiment is the well-known Diet Coke and Mentos reaction. A more detailed description of the experimental results has been published elsewhere.

One or more theoretical frameworks or orientations are used in qualitative education research. In this paper, the main tenets, the background and the appropriateness of phenomenography, which is one of the theoretical frameworks used in qualitative research, will be depicted. Further, the differences among phenomenography, phenomenology and…

The disciplinary culture theory presumes that if a scholar has been familiar with self-archiving through an existing subject-based repository, this scholar will be more enthusiastic about contributing his/her research to an institutional repository than one who has not had the experience. To test the theory, this article examines self-archiving…