Curricular analytics (CA) is a quantitative method that analyzes the sequence of courses (curriculum) that students in an undergraduate academic program must complete to fulfill the requirements of the program. The main hypothesis of CA is that the less complex a curriculum is, the more likely it is that students complete the program. This study…

This article addresses physics teachers' views about physics teaching in upper-secondary school. Their views have been investigated nationwide through a web-based questionnaire. The questionnaire has been developed based on several published instruments and is part of an ongoing project on the role of mathematics in physics teaching at…

Thinking in Physics (TIP) is a new curriculum that is more effective than commonly used interactive engagement methods for students who have the greatest difficulty learning physics. Research has shown a correlation between learning in physics and other factors, including scientific reasoning ability. The TIP curriculum addresses those factors.…

Science communication competence (SCC) is an important educational goal in the school science curricula of several countries. However, there is a lack of research about the structure and the assessment of SCC. This paper specifies the theoretical framework of SCC by a competence model. We developed a qualitative assessment method for SCC that is…

We implemented peer instruction in an introductory level conceptual physics course for nonscience majors on the basis of the success others reported with this method. We expected to see that learning from peer conversation, as evidenced by answering conceptual questions correctly following discussion, would correlate with course grade, but we did…

Students from five high schools participated in a 2 to 4-week microcomputer based laboratory (MBL) physics curriculum in two groups. One group completed the curriculum entirely online, and the other completed the same curriculum in a traditional classroom setting. Variables were collected to predict student success on a post-unit measure of…

In the course of the last decade the Dortmund Summer Symposium has developed into an internationally acknowledged conference, with English as the language of communication every other year. This book presents the following papers given at the 1992 conference: (1) Learning Science: Insights from Research on Teaching and Assessment (D. R. Baker);…