For years there has been an acknowledged interest in having students assess the rationality of their solutions to physics problems. In fact, many textbooks now routinely include end-of-problem assessments as part of the authors' detailed solutions to examples. Over the past two decades, I have experimented with various forms of end-of-problem…

When teaching a general education introductory astronomy course that includes a mathematics prerequisite, it is important to convey that formulas and equations physically represent properties of actual objects and processes that occur that can actually be observed. Students with varying comfort levels with mathematics often need to be convinced…

Substantial research in teaching and learning has supported the use of active learning strategies in the classroom to improve student learning of fundamental physics concepts and problem-solving skills. The use of worksheets in class has become a widespread successful practice. In this paper, we analyzed numerous completed student worksheets to…

We share a flipped class approach to university calculus-based general physics that shows increased learning and high student satisfaction compared to traditional lecture classes.

Igniting excitement for physics in our students is a goal of every instructor. In this paper, we discuss a unique example of the concept of density, a subject that is rarely viewed as intriguing by students. By combining a problem involving dinosaurs and an effective density, our students' interest is often captured through calculating an…

Collisions are real-world situations from everyday life (such as car crashes, playing billiards, etc.) that can be described and understood by the principle of conservation of momentum. One might expect that learning from simple collisions might help students understand more complicated physical phenomena. However, from our teaching experiences we…

This paper addresses a popular topic in science teaching and competitions for primary and secondary school students. Experiments with colliding coins are relatively easy to perform and therefore popular in science lessons. We used the idea in the science competition we organized for pupils aged 6 to 13 years.7 The science competition is based on a…

College physics textbooks (algebra based) tend to shy away from topics that are usually thought to require calculus. I suspect that most students are just as happy to avoid these topics. Occasionally, I encounter students who are not so easily satisfied, and have found it useful to maintain a storehouse of non-calculus solutions for some common…

Students in the physical sciences--physics and chemistry--often take multiple-choice exams for introductory courses. Some students will write a lot on their exams, while others write very little. Does the student doing more scratch work on their exam perform better than one who does not write as much? We analyzed multiple-choice exams in physics…

Symmetry and invariance play a fundamental role in modern physics and related disciplines, and students entering a STEM field need practice with symmetry-based arguments as part of the preparation for their future careers. We refer to symmetry based solutions as those that either make use of the existing geometric symmetry in a problem to simplify…

Over the past several years, we have contributed articles to "TPT" that focus on a forensics-style reexamination of significant historical events. The purpose of these articles is to afford students the opportunity to apply basic principles of physics to unsolved mysteries and potentially settle the historical debate. We assembled the…

Most physics instructors believe that adequate sleep is important in order for students to perform well on problem solving, and many instructors advise students to get plenty of sleep the night before an exam. After years of giving such advice to students at Loyola Marymount University (LMU), one of us decided to find out how many hours students…

Analysis of collisions is standardly included in the introductory physics course. In one dimension (1D), there do not seem to be any unusual issues: Typically, the initial velocities of the two colliding objects are specified, and the problem is to find the final velocities. In 1D there are therefore two unknown variables. One can write the…

Before students learn Kirchhoff's rules, they are typically taught how to solve "combined series-parallel" circuits. The method presented in many textbooks begins by drawing a series of simplified circuits, replacing series and/or parallel elements with their equivalent resistances, eventually reducing the circuit to a voltage source and…

An important step in learning to use math in science is learning to see symbolic equations not just as calculational tools, but as ways of expressing fundamental relationships among physical quantities, of coding conceptual information, and of organizing physics knowledge structures. In this paper, I propose "anchor equations" as a…