Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to one's existing ideas. Despite being two distinct processes, modeling is often described as sensemaking of the…

Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. The Modeling Framework for Experimental Physics describes the process by which physicists revise their models to account for the newly acquired observations, or change their apparatus to better represent their models when they encounter discrepancies…

Identifying and understanding student difficulties with physics content in a wide variety of topical areas is an active research area within the physics education research community. Of particular value are investigations of physics topics that appear multiple times in different contexts across the undergraduate physics curriculum. As these common…