This paper has proposed to investigate the interest in students towards physics among other science subjects. The investigation was carried out with 490 samples of grade ten students in Wolaita Soddo town governmental schools. Thus, overall result indicates that the interest in students towards physics is low and students hate to learn physics in…

Mental modeling, which is a theory about knowledge organization, has been recently studied by science educators to examine students' understanding of scientific concepts. This qualitative study investigates undergraduate students' mental models of atomic spectra. Nine second-year physics students, who have already taken the basic chemistry and…

We report some of the common, prevalent conceptual resources that students used to reason about energy, based on our analysis of written responses to questions given to 807 introductory physics students. These resources include, for example, associating forms of energy with indicators, relating forces and energy, and representing energy…

The aim of this research was to determine the interests of high school students in Physics and variable of how the influential factors on their interests depending on gender. The research sample included 154 (F:78 M:76) high school students. A structured interview form was used as the data collection tool in the study. The research data were…

One of the important questions for any educator is, "How can I teach difficult and abstract concepts in a way that connects with students' real life?". This is especially true in the senior years, when students are often confronted with ideas that don't appear relevant to their lives, are primarily explainable using mathematics rather…

This study analyses the use of audio description in teaching physics concepts, aiming to determine the variables that influence the understanding of the concept. One education resource was audio described. For make the audio description the screen was freezing. The video with and without audio description should be presented to students, so that…

A number of cultural, social, environmental, and biological factors have been suggested to explain women's relatively lower representation in physics and other science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Given its persistence, the causes of gender disparities are likely to be complex and multiply determined. In this review paper, we…

There is growing evidence of persistent gender achievement gaps in university physics instruction, not only for learning physics content, but also for developing productive attitudes and beliefs about learning physics. These gaps occur in both traditional and interactive-engagement (IE) styles of physics instruction. We investigated one gender gap…

The Longitudinal Study of Astronomy Graduate Students (LSAGS) arose from the 2003 Women in Astronomy Conference, where it was noted that a majority of young members of the American Astronomical Society were women. The astronomy community wishes to make every effort to retain young women in astronomy, so they commissioned a longitudinal study to be…

Three hundred and forty-one children (M[subscript age] = 9,0 years) engaged in a series of science tasks in collaborative, same-sex pairs or did not interact. All children who collaborated on the science tasks advanced in basic-level understanding of the relevant task (motion down an incline). However, only boys advanced in their conceptual…

This study investigates university students' graph interpretation strategies and difficulties in mathematics, physics (kinematics), and contexts other than physics. Eight sets of parallel (isomorphic) mathematics, physics, and other context questions about graphs, which were developed by us, were administered to 385 first-year students at the…

We present a newly validated and refined framework, TA-PIVOT (TA Practices In and Views Of Teaching), for examining how physics TAs talk about and how they engage in physics teaching. This work builds upon and extends prior efforts to characterize instructors' beliefs and practices by examining both domains in parallel. We present the…

Although weight and mass are considered fundamental concepts in physics, they are still not well understood by students. A computer simulation was designed to improve students' learning of these concepts and compared it with other teaching strategies. The research was carried out with 142 students (7th grade; 12-13 years old), from three schools.…

This note is a response to a recent paper by McClelland (2011 "Phys. Educ." 46 469-471). The situation of a person who is walking horizontally along the ground is examined, and the statement "The person is accelerated by a net force from the Earth" is considered invalid. A key point in McClelland's analysis is his claim that: "The force…

Following a discussion of forces, torques, and the conditions for static equilibrium, I tell my introductory mechanics class that I will show them how to measure the coefficient of static friction, us, between the surfaces of a block and the front bench using "nothing but a straightedge". After a few seconds of hushed anticipation, I nudge the…