The relationship between physics and mathematics is reviewed upgrading the common in physics classes' perspective of mathematics as a toolkit for physics. The nature of the physics-mathematics relationship is considered along a certain historical path. The triadic hierarchical structure of discipline-culture helps to identify different ways in…

The aim of this study is to reveal the high school students' images of physicists. Participants of this study consisted of 85 students in a high school in a province center on the East Black Sea Region of Turkey. The data were obtained by adapting the "Draw A Scientist Test" developed by Chambers (1983) and updated by Song & Kim…

Teaching critical thinking (CT) to prospective teachers has been a concern for a long time, and prospective teacher training becomes an appropriate period for interventions that promote CT ability. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a model of learning that accommodates aspects of prior knowledge, motivation, and CT. This study aims to develop…

Despite national curricula and instructional reforms calling for collaborative problem-solving skills (CPS), however, there is an absence of a theory-laden model showing how to effectively construct CPS for science learning. We therefore developed and validated a simulation-based CPS model that exploits its constructs, sequences, and causal…

Mechanobiology is an interdisciplinary field that aims to understand how physical forces impact biological systems. Enhancing our knowledge of mechanobiology has become increasingly important for understanding human disease and developing novel therapeutics. There is a societal need to teach diverse students principles of mechanobiology so that we…

This research is a needs analysis study aimed at developing a curriculum based on an interdisciplinary context-based learning approach within the 10th-grade physics course, focusing on the electricity and magnetism unit. The research was designed according to the case study model and data were collected from expert, teacher, and student sample…

Men significantly outnumber women in physics, engineering, and computer science (PECS) majors, with a recent male-to-female ratio of approximately 4:1, a stark contrast to the near parity in other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines (1). This gender disparity in PECS carries wide-reaching implications for equity,…

Many concepts in astrophysics research can be difficult for a lay individual to understand or to comprehend their importance. One such example concept is the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, which detects high-energy neutrinos at the South Pole in Antarctica. The observatory uses information from detected neutrinos originating deep in outer space to…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] A level of curricular design, called "design tactics," is identified to fill a gap in the research literature between the broad principles that guide curriculum development and the detailed writing of specific activities and lessons. The use of…

In developing and modifying a course called "Intuitive Quantum Physics" for nonscience majors, several social and theoretical commitments informed our design decisions. We believed that the goal of a general education course should not be acquiring content knowledge alone, but more generally developing an approach to thinking…

Professional knowledge is an important source of science teachers' actions in the classroom (e.g., personal professional content knowledge [pedagogical content knowledge, PCK] is the source of enacted PCK in the refined consensus model [RCM] for PCK). However, the evidence for this claim is ambiguous at best. This study applied a cross-lagged…

The purpose of this study was to develop two Sudoku puzzles for undergraduate students which can be utilised in the context of introductory physical science courses in order to assist them to practice SI prefixes. For this reason, SI prefixes for decimal multiples and submultiples were addressed in two separate puzzles. To test the puzzles, a case…

Worldwide, open-ended questions that require short answers have been used in many exams in fields of science, such as the International Student Assessment Program (PISA), the International Science and Maths Trends Research (TIMSS). However, multiple-choice questions are used for many exams at the national level in Turkey, especially high school…

The specialised uses of solid angles mean that they are quite unfamiliar quantities. This article, apart from making solid angles a little more familiar, brings out several topics of general interest, such as how units are interrelated and how equations depend on the choice of units. Although the steradian is commonly used as the unit for solid…

In this paper, we aim to show strategies for improving graph interpretation skills at middle and high school students using OZOBOT® BIT, a small and relatively low-cost programmable robot which had been used to teach programming to young children. OZOBOT's speed can be controlled by drawing lines with colour codes, as well as through a visual…