Introductory physics courses can be a challenge for some college students, especially those that have not taken Advanced Placement (AP) physics courses in high school. Even some classical mechanics concepts, such as energy, power, or the laws of Newton, can be non-intuitive and hard to grasp. When it comes to evaluating the learning outcome of our…

Engineering design was integrated into K-12 science education in the "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS Lead States, 2013), but teaching design remains a challenge for educators. Design problems are ill-defined, ill-structured, and complex problem-solving tasks. Their solutions require creativity and recursive, metacognitive…

Research indicates that troubleshooting activities that require students to reflect on pre-prepared erroneous examples, i.e. erroneous solutions to problems that correspond to common naïve ideas, impact their learning positively. These include asking students to diagnose erroneous examples; in other words, detect the conceptual errors and then…

Reflection is critical for adolescents' problem solving and learning in game-based learning environments (GBLEs). Yet challenges exist in the literature because most studies lack a theoretical perspective and clear operational definition to inform how and when reflection should be scaffolded during game-based learning. In this paper, we address…

The growing adoption of active learning techniques in physics courses requires that students productively engage in collaboration with their peers. Although studies in physics education research (PER) have addressed aspects of group work, the problem persists of how to engage students in collaborative work with appropriate self-awareness, adequate…

Educating new generations of physicists is often seen as a matter of attracting good students, teaching them physics and making sure that they stay at the university. Sometimes, questions are also raised about what could be done to increase diversity in recruitment. Using a discursive perspective, in this study of three introductory quantum…

The previous research result showed that the learning model based on the investigation could increase the students' critical thinking skills. The aim of this research was to measure the effectiveness of the using of problem-based learning model to increase the students' critical thinking skills. The research design was quasi-experiment by using…

Quantum mechanics has completed century since its genesis. Quantum mechanics is taught at various levels-starting from school and colleges to universities. Regression methods are introduced at under graduate and post graduate levels to solve Schrodinger equation for finding solutions of various trivial and non-trivial physical problems. The common…

The aim of this study was to characterise thoroughly the differences between Physics Olympiad competitors' and regular students' successes and approaches in relation to counterintuitive dynamics problems (CDPs) in order to discover some of the differences between skilled problem-solvers and those with fewer such skills. A total of 23 Physics…

Background: It is widely known that for many students it is very difficult to correctly predict how thermal expansion affects the appearance of a metal plate with a circular hole. Interviews with school teachers show that the source of this difficulty could stem from the fact that students' internal visualizations of an arbitrary object's thermal…

Computational thinking (CT) is a way of making sense of the natural world and problem solving with computer science concepts and skills. Although CT and science integrations have been called for in the literature, empirical investigations of such integrations are lacking. Prior work in natural selection education indicates students struggle to…

Assessment, including course exams, clearly indicates to students what learning goals they are expected to master in a certain course. However, most of these assessments tend to focus on generating a correct answer rather than on the type of reasoning or skills used to arrive at the answer. If educators value skills in addition to the correctness…

This study examined effects of the Polya's problem solving Technique (POPSOT) as observed by Shaibu (1987) in Atadoga (2010) and conventional problem-solving Technique (CONPSOT) on cognitive achievement of physics students. A pre-test post-test quasi experimental design used adopted for the study. The sample comprised of 102 senior secondary two…

This study aimed to determine the differences in science process skills in each class in the Physics Education Study Program. This research was a quantitative study with a comparison design. The sample was 108 students with details of 54 control class students who used conventional guidebooks, while the control class totaling 54 students used a…

This article is aimed at justifying sensible use of inventive tasks in physics teaching. The justification will encourage teachers to form learners' creative thinking; in particular, the course of physics has the great potential for forming learners' creative thinking. Being adapted to the course of physics, the basic stages to solve inventive…