Vertical amusement rides let your body experience the tickling sensation of feeling light, but also feeling much heavier than as usual, due to velocity changes as you move up and down. Family rides offer different possibilities to visualize the forces that are experienced by your accelerating body. This paper presents a number of different ways to…

We study the case of Marya, a freshman engineering major who showed and spoke of a drastic shift in her feelings and approach to learning physics during an introductory course. For the first several weeks, she was anxiously manipulating equations without considering physical meaning, and she was terribly worried about being correct. By the end of…

The mindset literature is a longstanding area of psychological research focused on beliefs about intelligence, response to challenge, and goals for learning. However, the mindset literature's applicability to the context of college physics has not been widely studied. In this paper we narrow our focus toward students' descriptions of their…

We describe the design rationale and structure of a Methods for Teaching Physics course that was redesigned as a project-based learning (PBL) environment, and the entailed learning process it fostered. The projects consisted of the design and teaching of physics lessons with predefined content and pedagogical focus and were structured as a guided…

In this study with 153 middle school students, we investigate the influence of the number of decimal places from the reading of a measurement device on students' decisions to change or keep an initial hypothesis about falling objects. Participants were divided into three groups, introduced to two experiments--the time it takes a free falling…

We conducted an exploratory study on affect regulation during game-based learning where 110 college-aged participants (M[subscript age] = 22.14, SD[subscript age] = 1.24; 50.0% female; 70.0% White) played an easy, medium, and difficult level of an educational game (Physics Playground) while self-reporting their strongest affective state and…

The enacted curriculum and classroom artifacts of a full unit of instruction from three subject areas (biology, chemistry, and physics) at two levels of instruction (regular and advanced) were analyzed for the presence and degree of mathematics and critical thinking. These characteristics were selected from a review of the literature on college…

This paper is based on the background of the problem of the low high order thinking skills in students, especially in the skills to think creatively and conceptual understanding. Conceptual understanding that students have in relation to physics learning material has an important role in developing students' high order thinking skills in solving…

Conducting experiments in physics using modern measuring techniques, and particularly those utilizing computers, is often much more attractive to students than conducting experiments conventionally. However, the cost of professional kits in the Czech Republic is still very expensive for many schools. The basic equipment for one student workplace…

This paper provides the formula for the elevation angle at which a projectile has to be fired in a vacuum from a general position to hit a target at a given distance. A spreadsheet application that models the trajectory is presented, and the problem of finding the points of shot and impact of a projectile moving in a vacuum if three points of the…

I had a solid geometry teacher in high school who, when looking at a particular theorem, liked to say, "It's intuitively obvious." In college I heard that same phrase from a professor teaching electrodynamics. And when I taught in college a colleague of mine liked to tell his students that the laws of physics were "intuitively…

This paper is a quasi-experimental investigation into the effectiveness of using analogy in teaching new and unfamiliar physics concepts to students enrolled in a British curriculum school in the United Arab Emirates. The students (N = 34) were randomly assigned to one of two groups: the control group (N = 17) following the traditional teaching…

The instructional lab setting has been found to be dominated by prescribed tasks and pre-prepared lab kits. This was explained by teachers' need to guide students to simultaneously progress through a lab curriculum, which prompts them to standardize the lab experience. Nevertheless, prominent professional associations have persistently called to…

Teaching science concepts for conceptual understanding has its challenges. Promoting conceptual change in the science classroom can be difficult because most concepts are complicated and counter-intuitive. This dissertation research aimed to determine the effect of teaching for conceptual understanding models on pre-service teachers' conceptual…

Studies have shown the potential of explainer videos. An alternative is a written explanation, as found in science textbooks. Prior research suggests that instructional explanations sometimes lead to the belief that a topic has been fully understood, even though that is, not the case. This 'illusion of understanding' may be affected by the medium…