The problem here dealt with concerns physics education, and specifically the concept of force. The idea behind this research is that a historical approach to the teaching of such a notion is of great help for the students to fully understand the meaning of this basic physical magnitude. For, most of scientific concepts can be better grasped by the…

This study analyses the effectiveness of directed vs. minimally directed inquiry-based instructional approaches in improving students' attitudes toward physics. It specifically compares the impacts of cognitively guided instructional strategy (CGIS) and Cubing instructional strategy (CIS) on student attitudes. Using a pretest--post-test…

We address the extent to which students developed expert attitudes in the individual disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics during their degree programme. By attitudes we mean the way students think about the sciences compared to discipline experts. We used the standard CLASS survey instrument to compare student attitudes to biology,…

Today, knowledge and technology are produced rapidly. In this case, the aim of educators is to develop appropriate environments instead of presenting information directly to students and to develop students' ability to access and use information by blending it with other information. This situation reveals the importance of concept education in…

Practical work in optics is essential to understand complex abstract phenomena. Consequently, hands-on experiments are part of most physics' curricula, despite the fact that they can be hard to set up and maintain. In this article, we present a virtual laboratory tool, called SHIRE, which allows students to carry out optical experiments from a…

Purpose: The current project aimed to examine the effects of two experimental cognitive-linguistic paradigms, the Stroop task and a primed Stroop task, on speech kinematics and perioral muscle activation. Method: Acoustic, kinematic, and surface electromyographic data were collected from the verbal responses of 30 young adult healthy control…

Previous research has found gender inequitable equipment usage across various lab course contexts. Few studies, however, have tested possible remediation strategies. In this work, we use hierarchical linear modeling to compare men and women's lab equipment usage in two group work structures across three course contexts. In one in-person course,…

This study explored patterns of social interaction and group-level regulation in terms of co- and socially shared regulation in collaborative learning and their relation to learners' metacognitive task perceptions. 72 secondary school students performed collaborative physics tasks in small groups over multiple 90-minute sessions. Video recordings…

Over four decades of conceptual change studies in education have been based on the assumption that learners come to science classrooms with functionally fixated intuitive ideas. However, it is largely ignored that such pre-instructional conceptions are probabilistic, reflecting some aspects of an idiosyncratic sampling of their experiences and…

This study presents a bibliometric review analysis of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) integrated project-based learning (PjBL) used in promoting meaningful physics learning at the secondary education level. It aims to provide in-depth information about the research landscape of STEM-integrated PjBL models in physics…

Social network analysis (SNA) has been widely used in physics education research (PER) in recent years, but mostly in a limited range of the available modalities. This paper describes a unique approach to egocentric, mixed-methods SNA applied to qualitative network data obtained from 100 interviews with women and/or queer professional physicists.…

In this paper, we describe our extension of the action, process, object, schema (APOS) theory to capture the complex interplay of mathematics and physics. We do this in the context of the 2D heat equation. We describe a hypothetical learning trajectory of the 2D heat equation, a preliminary genetic decomposition that stresses the conceptual…

Undergraduate science students face difficulties using mathematics in their physics courses. Choosing an institutional perspective, we consider that these students experience a permanent transition between mathematics in their mathematics courses and mathematics in their physics courses. We refer to the anthropological theory of the didactic and…

As the need for a quantum-ready workforce grows, educators in quantum information science and engineering (QISE) face the challenge of aligning their programs and courses with industry needs. Through a series of interviews with program directors and faculty across 15 different institutions, we identified the considerations that educators are…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Qualitative Methods in PER: A Critical Examination.] Epistemic beliefs about physics are most often investigated using quantitative instruments that reflect binary conceptualizations of those beliefs. This study reports from a qualitative study which used continua to represent the epistemic beliefs…