This study seeks to determine whether giving an explicit incentive to students in an upper-division first-semester electromagnetism course (EM1), in the form of partial credit for reworking unit exam problems, will improve their problem-solving skills as measured by performance on identical problems on the final exam. Three problems--a primarily…

Limiting case analysis (LCA) is important to practicing physicists. Yet, there is little concrete guidance for physics educators, and a lack of consensus in the research community about how to help students learn, and learn from, limiting case analysis. In this study, we first review existing literature to find commonalities and variations in how…

Electrostatic potential energy is a topic of great difficulty for many students. In this paper, we empirically test the utility of two approaches for laying a foundation for developing an understanding of energy in an electrostatic context, with interdisciplinary relevance. We examine student responses to a question about how the potential energy…