Discusses how Black educators say too few young Blacks, regardless of whether they attend historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) or majority White institutions, are choosing physics as an undergraduate major or a career with the acquisition of a Ph.D. Explores the role that HBCUs, collaboration with the federal government, and Black…

Students participate more in a classroom and also report a better understanding of course concepts when steps are taken to actively engage them. The Student Engagement (SE) Survey was developed and used in this study for measuring student engagement at the class level and consisted of 14 questions adapted from the original National Survey of…

This theoretical article examines reading processes using chaos theory as an analogy. Three principles of chaos theory are identified and discussed, then related to reading processes as revealed through eye movement research. Used as an analogy, the chaos theory principle of sensitive dependence contributes to understanding the difficulty in…

Model rocketry is one of the best ways to get students interested in the physical sciences. Following safety guidelines, rocketry can really turn students on to science and also help them understand the applications of theories and scientific principles (Newton's laws of motion, force, mass, projectile motion, etc.) they are learning. The study…

This article describes a study into the role of heuristic support in facilitating discovery learning through simulation-based learning. The study compares the use of two such learning environments in the physics domain of collisions. In one learning environment (implicit heuristics) heuristics are only used to provide the learner with guidance…

The idea of causality is central in science and has long given rise to debate among philosophers and scientists. While the tendency to avoid causality seems to have become dominant in science and philosophy, research in science education has shown the strong presence in common reasoning of causal explanations, often conceived as a 'mechanism'…

Teachers' failure to use the microcomputer-based laboratory (MBL) more widely may be a result of not recognizing its capacity to transform laboratory activities. This research aimed to increase understanding of how MBL activities designed to be consistent with a constructivist theory of learning support or constrain student construction of…

This study investigates the understanding of 18 first-year undergraduate students when simultaneously presented with two contrasting dynamical situations: the idealized (without air resistance) and real-world cases of balls being dropped or thrown. Previous work has shown that getting students to recognize flaws in their mental models helps them…

This article explores the concept of the center of gravity and the geometry involved in locating the center of gravity of an object. (Contains 15 figures.)

In this article, the author features "the sidewalk project" in Littleton High School. The sidewalk project is a collaboration of more than 40 high school physics students, 10 local mentors, and a few regional and national organizations who worked together to invent a way to heat a sidewalk with an alternative energy source. The project, which…

Most studies about students' conceptions and conceptual change are based exclusively on the analysis language, which is treated as a tool to make private contents of the mind public to researchers. Following recent studies that focused on (a) language and discursive practice and (b) the pragmatics of communication that draws on talk, gestures, and…

This study was an attempt to identify the epistemological roots of knowledge when students carry out hands-on experiments in physics. We found that, within the context of designing a solution to a stated problem, subjects constructed and ran thought experiments intertwined within the processes of conducting physical experiments. We show that the…

This article describes a research study concerning students' conceptions and reasonings about fluids and pressure in static situations. After a preliminary survey involving interviews and observations in class, some written questions were answered by various groups, totalling 428 Italian and French pupils in upper secondary school, 458 first-year…

The purpose of the study was to determine the patterns of interdependency among classroom interaction patterns, teacher and student variables and students' learning outcomes in physics, comprising their post-instructional attitude and achievement in "low" and "high" academic tasks. Seven instruments were used in collecting data from 516 Senior…

Galileo's discovery of the properties of pendulum motion depended on his adoption of the novel methodology of idealisation. Galileo's laws of pendulum motion could not be accepted until the empiricist methodological constraints placed on science by Aristotle, and by common sense, were overturned. As long as scientific claims were judged by how the…