The Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment (BEMA), developed by Chabay and Sherwood, was designed to assess student understanding of basic electricity and magnetism concepts covered in college-level calculus-based introductory physics courses. To evaluate the reliability and discriminatory power of this assessment tool, we performed…

The reliability and validity of professionally written multiple-choice exams have been extensively studied for exams such as the SAT, graduate record examination, and the force concept inventory. Much of the success of these multiple-choice exams is attributed to the careful construction of each question, as well as each response. In this study,…

Coordination class theory is used to explain college students' judgments about animated depictions of moving objects. diSessa's coordination class theory models a "concept" as a complex knowledge system that can reliably determine a particular type of information in widely varying situations. In the experiment described here, fifty individually…

There are many spontaneous conceptions related to the principle of action and reaction for two bodies in static contact. A study of a broad sample of students showed Newton's third law to be a great unknown for most of them. The conceptions were found to be consistent, forming authentic minitheories (implicit theories) with general laws governing…

Computers are routinely used to control experiments in modern science laboratories. This should be reflected in laboratories in an educational setting. There is a mismatch between the power that can be delivered by a computer interfacing card or a TTL logic circuit and that required by many practical pieces of laboratory equipment. One common way…

In a repeated measures design (pretest, posttest, 1-year follow-up) with 161 3rd-grade students, the authors compared 2 curricula on floating and sinking within constructivist learning environments, varying in instructional support. The 2 curricula differed in the sequencing of content and the teacher's cognitively structuring statements. At the…

Chantilly High School Academy Robotics Team Number 612 from Chantilly, Virginia, is an award-winning team of high school students actively involved with FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a multinational nonprofit organization that inspires students to transform culture--making science, math, engineering and…

The article is addressing how students reason about the origin and development of the universe. Students' own views as well as their descriptions of physical models are analysed. Data consists of written surveys, and interviews of a subset of the students. Most of the students relate to the Big Bang model when describing the origin of the…

One of the largest challenges in teaching introductory soil science is explaining the dynamics of soil infiltration. To aid students in understanding the concept and to further engage them in active learning in the soils laboratory course, we developed an exercise using Decagon Mini-Disk Infiltrometers with a tension head (h[subscript o]) of 2 cm.…

College science teachers know that students get the most out of class if they have completed the assigned reading. To reinforce this expectation, we ask our introductory physics students to submit a question they had about the reading. In this paper we describe the rationale and logistics of this assignment. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

A class centered on student design of experiments and peer review of the resulting reports is described. Thirteen students in an honors seminar section of an introductory physics class designed experiments to test various types of paranormal phenomena. Each experimental report was evaluated and ranked by several other students. To give them…

The practical scenarios discussed in a chemistry or chemical engineering course that use solid or liquid reactants are presented. Important ideas to be considered when handling pressurized fluids are provided and three typical examples are described to enable students develop secondary skills such as the selective search of data, identification of…

Background: In view of the shortage of students majoring in science, we examined the image of physics in terms of students' implicit, automatic associations with physics. Aims: To describe the specific image of physics that might alienate students ("difficulty," "masculinity," "heteronomy") and test an intervention…

A calculus-based introductory physics course, which is based on the Matter and Interactions curriculum of Chabay and Sherwood (2002), has been taught at Purdue University. Characteristic of this course is its emphasis on modeling. Therefore, I would like to investigate the effects of modeling-based instruction and interactive engagement on…

In spring 2007, four Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) Science and Technology/Engineering (STE) operational tests were introduced at the high school level (grades 9 and 10): Biology, Chemistry, Introductory Physics, and Technology/Engineering. Over 100,000 Massachusetts public high school students in grades 9 and 10 participated…