Visual aids are important to student learning, and they help make the teacher's job easier. Keeping with the "TPT" theme of "The Art, Craft, and Science of Physics Teaching," the purpose of this article is to show how teachers, lacking equipment and funds, can construct a durable 3-D model reference frame and a model gravity…

The nature of the drag force on an object moving through a fluid is well documented and many experiments have been described to allow students to measure the force. For low speed flows the drag force is proportional to the velocity of the object, while at high flow speeds the drag force is proportional to the velocity squared. The basic physics…

Energy is a crosscutting concept in science and features prominently in national science education documents. In the "Next Generation Science Standards," the primary conceptual learning goal is for learners to conserve energy as they "track" the transfers and transformations of energy within, into, or out of the system of…

A simple mistake in properly setting up a measuring device caused millions of dollars to be spent in correcting the initial optical failure of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This short article is intended as a lesson for a physics laboratory and discussion of errors in measurement.

We are continuing our examination of very different physics availability numbers reported by AIP Statistics and the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR). The essential difference appears to be the number of schools included in the denominator. The U.S. Department of Education classifies schools into one of five types based…

It never fails: you're in your office and the phone rings. Your department head says, "Hi! Fifty kids are coming to campus in 30 minutes. Can you meet with them and give them a one-hour hands-on activity that will make them excited about physics?" Likely you'll run to your demonstration room and grab anything that'll generate a bright…

This paper describes a simple experiment that lets first-year physics and engineering students discover an important physical property of a Slinky. The restoring force for the fundamental oscillation frequency is provided only by those coils between the support and the Slinky center of mass.

Students often tend to compartmentalize material learned in school. While we see this phenomenon within our own classes, it is even more apparent that students have difficulty making connections between their math and physics courses. We believe that hands-on experiments are particularly useful in helping students make these connections. In this…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the potential for estimating subglottal air pressure using a neck-surface accelerometer and to compare the accuracy of predicting subglottal air pressure relative to predicting acoustic sound pressure level (SPL). Method: Indirect estimates of subglottal pressure (P[subscript sg]') were obtained…

The objective of this study was to investigate the physics student-teachers misconceptions in force and motion concepts in Jordanian universities by using the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) test and to identify the cause of misconceptions related to these concepts. Also, the FCI has been used to detect whether misconceptions vary according to…

A narrative inquiry approach was adapted to study teacher's experiences of planning and teaching force and motion topics. Oral narrative data were collected through interview conversations between the researcher and the teachers about their experiences of planning and teaching force and motion concepts. "Narrative analysis" technique…

Background: Differences in post-secondary academic outcomes along dimensions of gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status are a major concern. Few studies have considered differences in patterns of academic outcomes and underlying mechanisms driving disparities across different STEM disciplines. Using data from about 4000 undergraduates in…

Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments may provide information about what faculty and/or researchers think it means to know and do physics, i.e.,…

The Colorado learning attitudes about science survey (CLASS) was given to 308 high school physics students in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where physics is taught every year through middle and high school. Student responses were tested using several different latent factor models: two based on those published in the recent literature and two new models…

Orbital Battleship, published in 2016 in this "Journal," is a hands-on competitive exercise which has been shown to be an efficient tool to reinforce the knowledge of the atomic structure. We decided to give it a more futuristic look and are presenting VR Orbital Battleship, a completely immersive collaborative experience which, in…