The Physics One Mechanics in a community college syllabus usually allocates more time to cover the topics in kinematics, dynamics, energy, momentum, and rotation; with relatively less time for the topics of fluid mechanics and heat diffusion in the creation of a knowledge gap for those students deciding on mechanical and chemical engineering…

The cases of constant and quadratic damping of free oscillations are missing from standard textbooks, even at college and university level. The case most examined is that of linear damping, the reason being that the student can work out a closed form which describes all stages of motion. The case of constant damping is straightforward to be…

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…

The present study explores students' understanding of calculus-based kinematics (henceforth, CBK), in which argumentation is taken as the sequence of the modes of fostering reasoning and problem-solving. The investigation stresses the importance of arguments students bring to the learning situation of CBK and recognizes the active construction of…

This paper demonstrates an experimental integrated lesson of physics and calculus in a topic of fluid force applying on different shapes of dams. This lesson was designed for the first year students in engineering program in an attempt to show them the connection between these two disciplines, as well as to introduce more advanced…

Contributing to a growing body of research on undergraduate students' quantitative reasoning, the study reported in this article used task-based interviews to investigate business calculus students' quantitative reasoning when solving two optimization tasks situated in the context of revenue and profit maximization. Analysis of verbal responses…

Students learning to separate variables in order to solve a differential equation have multiple ways of correctly doing so. The procedures involved in "separation" include "division" or "multiplication" after properly "grouping" terms in an equation, "moving" terms (again, at times grouped) from…

Separation of variables can be a powerful technique for solving many of the partial differential equations that arise in physics contexts. Upper-division physics students encounter this technique in multiple topical areas including electrostatics and quantum mechanics. To better understand the difficulties students encounter when utilizing the…

In this paper, we investigate which aspects are overriding in the concept images of monotonicity of Finnish tertiary mathematics students, i.e., on which aspects of monotonicity they base their argument in different types of exercises related to that concept. Further, we examine the relationship between the quality of principal aspects and the…

These proceedings contain papers of the 4th International Baltic Symposium on Science and Technology Education (BalticSTE2021) held in Šiauliai, Lithuania, June 21-22, 2021. This symposium was organized by the Scientific Methodical Center "Scientia Educologica" in cooperation with Scientia Socialis, Ltd. Lithuania. The proceedings are…

We discuss common difficulties in upper-division electricity and magnetism (E&M) in the areas of Gauss's law, vector calculus, and electric potential using both quantitative and qualitative evidence. We also show that many of these topical difficulties may be tied to student difficulties with mathematics. At the junior level, some students…

We designed a sequence of seven lessons to facilitate learning of integration in a physics context. We implemented this sequence with a single college sophomore, "Amber," who was concurrently enrolled in a first-semester calculus-based introductory physics course which covered topics in mechanics. We outline the philosophy underpinning these…

Previous studies have reported that students employed different problem solving approaches when presented with the same task structured with different representations. In this study, we explored and compared students' strategies as they attempted tasks from two topical areas, kinematics and work. Our participants were 19 engineering students…

This study investigates the common difficulties that students in introductory physics experience when solving problems involving integration in the context of electricity. We conducted teaching-learning interviews with 15 students in a second-semester calculus-based introductory physics course on several problems involving integration. We found…

We discuss the need for devoting time in differential equations courses to modelling and the completion of the modelling process with efforts to estimate the parameters in the models using data. We estimate the parameters present in several differential equation models of chemical reactions of order n, where n = 0, 1, 2, and apply more general…