Items that are chained, or blocked, together appear on many of the conceptual assessments utilized for physics education research. However, when items are chained together there is the potential to introduce local dependence between those items, which would violate the assumption of item independence required by classical test theory,…

Time and space have been shown to be interlinked in people's minds. To what extent can co-speech gestures influence thinking about time, over and above spoken language? In this study, we use the ambiguous question "Next Wednesday's meeting has been moved forward two days, what day is it on now?" to show that people either respond…

The dynamics of a spring pendulum is an important topic in introductory experimental physics courses at universities and advanced science courses in secondary school education. Different types of pendulum setups with smartphones were proposed to investigate, e.g., the gravitational acceleration, to measure spring constants, or to illustrate and…

The vector of aircraft motion and analysis using FlightRadar24 and Tracker motion analysis has been investigated and studied. The straight, turning and circular aircraft motion were recorded from www.flightradar24.com using a commercial desktop video recording. Then, the video of the aircraft motion was analyzed using Tracker 5.1.1 to determine…

The fact that a bungee jumper can reach an acceleration greater than the acceleration of gravity is, also from a physics point of view, intriguing. Taking only gravity into account, it can be explained by applying conservation of energy or by deriving carefully the equation of motion in a Newtonian approach. In this article we show how it can be…

A ball at rest on a surface can be made to bounce up by pushing it down then releasing the downward force as fast as possible. Measurements and calculations are presented to show how it can best be done.

Schools and universities continuously face new generations of students who struggle with stress management. Many learners have sedentary lifestyles in which they are deprived of somatic learning opportunities. Other learners experience feelings of dissociation and sensations of disembodiment that have a negative impact on their learning. This…

The more you know about the brains of your students, the better you can be at your profession. Brain-based teaching gives you the tools to boost cognitive functioning, decrease discipline issues, increase graduation rates, and foster the joy of learning. This innovative, new edition of the bestselling "Brain-Based Learning" by Eric…

In the teaching and learning of physics, simulations have many applications. Simulations can help to illuminate concepts (such as the motion of electrons in electric or magnetic fields) that cannot usually be seen with the unaided eye, or to slow down things that happen over short time periods or at high speeds. They can also be used to help…

Agency and its role in the early literacy classroom has long been a topic for debate. While sociocultural accounts often portray the child as a cultural agent who negotiates their own participation in classroom culture and literacy learning, more recent framings draw attention from the individual subject, instead seeing agency as dispersed across…

The motor and social skill difficulties experienced by many children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can create challenges when participating in age appropriate physical activity contexts. Although behavioral interventions can increase the general social communicative skills of children with ASD, often the skills targeted are not relevant to…

As Chinese shows both satellite- and verb-framed properties (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2012, 2016), it provides a unique lens through which to observe the extent of first-language (L1) typological influence in second language (L2) acquisition of motion expressions. This study has dual purposes. First, it extends Wu's (2016) investigation on motion…

With many universities now admitting students into their science programs with little or no prior knowledge of the relevant field, significant challenges arise in the way these fields are introduced. Challenges mount with various preconceived ideas regarding the levels of difficulty, thus necessitating introductory concepts be presented in…

This work describes a way to study uniform circular motion (UCM) using a LEGO® MINDSTORMS® Robotics Invention System (RIS) stepper motor with a steel ball attached to a string. The equipment is inexpensive and the resulting motion takes place on a human scale. Times and lengths can be measured with a stopwatch and a meterstick, respectively. In…

The advantages of deriving the coefficient of kinematic friction from measurements of the damping of oscillatory motion have recently been described. The measurement of the acceleration rather than displacement has the advantage that, as well as the linear amplitude decay, the acceleration discontinuities due to the friction reversal can be…