Analogy is one of the most potent tools in a teacher's repertoire and has been recognized as a common feature of quality science teaching. Emphasizes the limitations of the analogies used to explain scientific ideas. Highlights another potential difficulty: when the analogy is not as familiar to learners as the teacher may assume. (Contains 17…

Learning, which is understood as a change in behavior, is a process of becoming. This monograph introduces the neologism egosystem as an amalgam of the individual, the self and its attendant ego, and socio-environmental schemata swirling around the individual. In an uncertain and probabilistic universe, the role of chaos theory in recognizing…

What happens when university curriculum developers are mixed with motivated elementary teachers? ? An awesome learning collaboration that benefits researchers, teachers, and students! That's what the authors discovered when they--university researchers involved in the Physics for Elementary Teachers (PET) project--teamed up with local elementary…

Living things respond to a stimulus, which is a change in the surroundings. Some common stimuli are noises, smells, and things the people see or feel, such as a change in temperature. Animals often respond to a stimulus by moving. Because plants can't move around in the same way animals do, plants have to respond in a different way. Plants can…

Group phenomena and interactions are described through the use of the chaos theory constructs and characteristics of sensitive dependence on initial conditions, phase space, turbulence, emergence, self-organization, dissipation, iteration, bifurcation, and attractors and fractals. These constructs and theoretical tenets are presented as applicable…

The purpose of this study was to understand how the professor, teaching assistant, and students experienced inquiry-based science instruction in an undergraduate physics course designed for elementary education majors. During the teaching of a 6-week electricity unit, the professor faced several challenges: knowing when and how to tell the…

Some teachers have difficulty understanding Bernoulli's principle particularly when the principle is applied to the aerodynamic lift. Some teachers favor using Newton's laws instead of Bernoulli's principle to explain the physics behind lift. Some also consider Bernoulli's principle too difficult to explain to students and avoid teaching it…

Three sample physics problems are presented in this article. The solutions to the three problems addresses a major student difficulty in problem solving--knowing where to begin. The first suggested step is to begin by stating what is asked for. Step 2 is identifying the fundamental physics that underlies the problem situation. Step 3 is isolating…

The Diels-Alder reaction is used as an example for showing the integration of computational and preparative techniques, which help in demonstrating the physical organic concepts in synthetic organic chemistry. These experiments show that the students should not accept the computational results without questioning them and in many Diels-Alder…

The spontaneous mixing of helium and air in a helium-inflated balloon is described in an experiment in which the partial pressure of the gases in the balloon are determined from the mole factions and the total pressure measured in the balloon. The results described provide a model for teaching concepts of partial pressure, chemical potential, and…

Teachers incorporate the chaos game and the concept of a fractal into various areas of the algebra and geometry curriculum. The chaos game approach to fractals provides teachers with an opportunity to help students comprehend the geometry of affine transformations.

Theoretical and experimental evidence for the dependence of viscosities of the real gases on temperature is described, suggesting that this dependence is greater than that predicted by the kinetic theory of gases. The experimental results were obtained using common modern instrumentation and could be reproduced by students in analytical or…

This paper presents a retrospective analysis of two teaching-learning sequences about particle models. We will describe the design process for each sequence and will discuss it with respect to general frameworks such as Ingenierie Didactique and Educational Reconstruction. We will also describe and compare the ways we collected data and…

This paper describes 'didactical structures' as a possible outcome of research on teaching-learning sequences. Starting from an explicit didactical perspective, in this case a so-called problem-posing approach, the research emphasis lies on the didactical quality with which this particular perspective can be put into classroom practice in the…

Considers a problem of simple random walks to study distributions of variances. Describes watching a drunk over a period of nights, taking a number of steps per night. Explores the full probability distribution for the variance of the data string and discusses the connection of the results to the problem of data binning. (Author/NB)