On entry to university, high-achieving physics students from all across Australia struggle to identify Newton's third law force pairs. In particular, less than one in ten can correctly identify the Newton's third law reaction pair to the weight of (gravitational force acting on) an object. Most students incorrectly identify the normal force on the…

In this paper, we provide insight into the PBL project called PoLiMINT (Problem-oriented Learning in MINT). The project is located at the Bremen University of Applied Sciences and aims to introduce and foster PBL in the introductory phase of a physics study program. Concerning our general conditions, we will present our incremental implementation…

Graphs in physics are central to the analysis of phenomena and to learning about a system's behavior. The ways students handle graphs are frequently researched. Students' misconceptions are highlighted, and methods of improvement suggested. While kinematics graphs are to represent a real motion, they are also algebraic entities that must satisfy…

The work describes an analogy-based small oscillations analysis of a standard static equilibrium lab problem. In addition to force analysis, a potential energy function for the system is developed, and by drawing out mathematical similarities to the simple harmonic oscillator, we are able to describe (and experimentally verify) the period of small…

Being responsive to the substance of students' disciplinary thinking is central to current visions of reformed science teaching. Studies of classroom practice, however, show that this kind of teaching is relatively rare. In this paper, we use data from one cohort of university physics Learning Assistants (LAs) to illustrate what it looks like for…

In this article, we develop critiques of the pipeline model which dominates Western science education policy, using discourse analysis of interviews with two Swedish young women focused on "identity work". We argue that it is important to unpack the ways that the pipeline model fails to engage with intersections of gender, ethnicity,…

Students' difficulties in quantum mechanics may be the result of unproductive framing and not a fundamental inability to solve the problems or misconceptions about physics content. We observed groups of students solving quantum mechanics problems in an upper-division physics course. Using the lens of epistemological framing, we investigated four…

Laboratory courses represent a unique and potentially important component of the undergraduate physics curriculum, which can be designed to allow students to authentically engage with the process of experimental physics. Among other possible benefits, participation in these courses throughout the undergraduate physics curriculum presents an…

Introducing new physics phenomena through inquiry labs has been a staple of the successful physics teacher for years. Introducing new vocabulary through lab work, however, is less common. This paper offers an example of a simple and short lab that does just that, and one that I have found to be quite useful in my college prep physics courses to…

The year 2014 marked the four-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of Galileo's birth, making it the perfect occasion to present and illustrate a GeoGebra applet which reproduces some of Galileo's celebrated experiments on the uniformly accelerated motion, as reported on in "Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New…

Using a conventional notation for representing forces on diagrams, students were presented with questions on the interaction between two objects. The results show that complete understanding of Newton's Third Law of Motion is quite rare, and that some problems relate to misunderstanding which force acts on each body. The use of the terms…

Homework is an important component of most physics courses. One of the functions it serves is to provide meaningful formative assessment in preparation for examinations. However, correlations between homework and examination scores tend to be low, likely due to unproductive student behavior such as copying and random guessing of answers. In this…

The concepts of electricity and magnetism in physics are complex and demanding to learn because their meaning builds through several different phenomenological areas. Each of the phenomenological areas adds a certain facet of the meaning of the concept. All standard physics textbooks discuss at least 1) force, 2) energy and work, and 3) electric…

Assessment of student learning outcomes (SLOs) has become increasingly important in higher education. Meaningful assessment (i.e., assessment that leads to the improvement of student learning) is impossible without faculty engagement. We argue that one way to elicit genuine faculty engagement is to embrace the disciplinary differences when…

In this research, we gave to technical university students (N=50) and high school students (N=75) a verbally described situation of a partially defined physics problem. The task for the both groups of the students was to generate drawings of how they imagined the situation that the problem referred to. A fully abstract drawing was generated by 48%…