The ability to relate physical concepts and phenomena to multiple mathematical representations--and to move fluidly between these representations--is a critical outcome expected of physics instruction. In upper-division quantum mechanics, students must work with multiple symbolic notations, including some that they have not previously encountered.…

Within physics education research (PER), resource theory has proven to be a useful framework for investigating knowledge and learning and informing instructional design. To analyze learning over longer timescales and across cases, PER scholars must first identify and describe the resources activated within and across physics contexts and domains.…

In previous work, we described how three teachers differentially create opportunities for students to act as epistemic agents and to engage in collective knowledge-building work (Alzen et al., 2020). The descriptive nature of this previous research provided information about what variability can look like in classrooms attempting these…

Student participation in the science practices is more than following directions to conduct pre-determined experiments and analyze data with expected solutions. This requires classroom shifts that increase the epistemic agency of students: increase student involvement and authority in developing science knowledge and practices, rather than the…

This case study examined teachers' on-the-fly formative assessment conversations, that is, how teachers collect information from students' thinking and use that information to support their learning during teacher-student interactions. Previous studies have typically analysed whole-class discussions on the level of speaking turns, and have…

As students learn physics, they are often required to reason about the behavior of macroscopic and microscopic phenomena, and to synthesize prior knowledge from several different areas of physics to construct understanding of new ideas. This can be a tremendously difficult cognitive task for novice students, especially when the unfamiliar…

There is an ongoing challenge with STEM education: making physics, math, and science, in general, interesting, understandable, and retentive for college science and non-science majors, K-12 students, and the public. If not imparting detailed knowledge, at least one would like to introduce important concepts that will be remembered, appreciated,…

The protein folding reaction is one of the most important chemical reactions in the human body. Yet, despite its importance, it is sometimes omitted from undergraduate courses due to the challenging nature of some of the underlying concepts. To help make key concepts of the protein folding reaction accessible to our undergraduate students, we…

The Case Study (CS) method is a teaching methodology based on constructivism and centered on students, which actively develops their learning. Through the study of a case, which can be a real or fictional story based on everyday life, the student is asked to solve a dilemma and thus is expected to develop higher skills. Through this systematic…

In science classrooms, students usually see and work with data that's intended to tell them right away about the natural world. Students then often treat the data we provide to them as factual, rather than as a source of evidence (Duschl 2008; Sandoval and Millwood 2005; Berland and Reiser 2009; McNeill and Berland 2017; Hancock, Kaput, and…

We describe here a low-cost experiment for introductory physics students where they compare the physical properties of aluminum and steel by means of cantilever oscillations. This, in turn, allows the students to improve their physical intuition about these materials. Further, the students can apply their physics and mathematics knowledge and…

In the past decade, we have witnessed the emergence of a large number of different computer-based animations and simulations that have the goal to foster better learning of different physics topics. Past studies have shown many benefits of animations and simulations, but for their efficient usage it is very important that teachers are well…

Resistor--capacitor (RC) circuit labs help students, but most courses don't include them because of complications and cost. This work presents an easy and inexpensive Arduino-based lab on the charge and energy transfer between two capacitors with different values of the initial electric charge when they are connected through a resistor. Capacitors…

The udu is a traditional Nigerian percussion instrument that can be thought of as a Helmholtz resonator with two apertures. We use a simple two-particle mechanical analogue to study the behaviour of such a resonator and find that the model describes quite well the main features of udu acoustics.

Biochemistry, a complicated basic course in health sciences, plays a fundamental role in describing pathogenic mechanism of illness in molecular terms, and is required to be learned for all medical students. Due to various obstacles to biochemistry learning and teaching, there is a pressing issue of curriculum reform to arouse the student's…