A Cartesian conception of material space views each part as external to every other part: "partes extra partes." Because two material things cannot occupy the same space, each of it exists in itself, separated by a boundary from everything else, including other things. This ontology is the origin of thinking the world in terms of…

Lectures are often thought of in terms of information transfer: students (do not) "get" or "construct meaning of" what physics professors (lecturers) say and the notes they put on the chalkboard (overhead). But this information transfer view does not explain, for example, why students have a clear sense of understanding while they sit in a lecture…

Teachers often have difficulty implementing inquiry-based activities, leading to the arousal of negative emotions. In this multicase study of beginning physics teachers in Australia, we were interested in the extent to which their expectations were realized and how their classroom experiences while implementing extended experimental investigations…

Educators generally are concerned with testing what learners know by means of written tests, as if knowledge was some intrapsychological thing or state that could be translated and externalized into some interpsychologically available inscription that is a more-or-less accurate approximation of what the person knows. In such endeavors, language is…

Explores why students fail to learn from teacher demonstrations in a physics course. Reports that six dimensions may have prevented student learning, including lack of a theoretical framework to separate signals from noise, interference of discourses learned in other contexts, interference from other demonstrations and images, and problems in…

Studied analogy generation and development and analogical reasoning with 25 German tenth graders in a physics class. Results show the advantages and disadvantages of using analogies in promoting conceptual change and as a teaching technique. (SLD)

Uses videotaped lectures and interviews to understand lectures in a physics course for prospective elementary teachers. Reports that the professor staged Aristotle, natural philosophy, and students' observations and intuitive knowledge in opposition to Galileo, controlled experiments, and mathematical inscriptions. Concludes that this form of…

Over the past several years, an increasing number of educators have come to believe that teaching should acknowledge the transactional nature of knowledge and suggest that a shift be made to focus on social practice, meaning, and patterns. This style of teaching proposes that it is important to permit students to construct knowledge meaningfully…

Presents a study involving students (n=46) enrolled in an introductory physics course designed to describe and understand students' experimenting and problem-solving strategies in a constructivist learning environment. Concludes that students should be provided with problem-rich learning environments in which they learn to investigate phenomena of…

Several types of physics activities that use real-world problems to motivate learners, use computers to assist in developing conceptual understandings, connect problem situations to mathematical models, and use the models to analyze other real-world problems are presented. The topics of racing sports, sailing, and damped harmonic oscillations are…