We discuss how research on student difficulties was used as a guide to develop, validate, and evaluate a Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial (QuILT) to help students learn how to determine the completely symmetric bosonic or completely antisymmetric fermionic wave function and be able to compare and contrast them from the case when the particles…

We use analogies to provide introductory laboratory students intuition into measurement uncertainties. Using a battery-resistor circuit we discuss uncertainty concepts and derive expressions for uncertainty of the mean and sums of uncertainties. Finally, we draw attention to the fact that the interpretation of standard deviation as uncertainty…

Research and theory development in cognitive psychology and science education research remain largely isolated. Biology education researchers have documented persistent scientifically inaccurate ideas, often termed "misconceptions," among biology students across biological domains. In parallel, cognitive and developmental psychologists…

Well-designed digital games can deliver powerful experiences that are difficult to provide through traditional instruction, while traditional instruction can deliver formal explanations that are not a natural fit for gameplay. Combined, they can accomplish more than either can alone. An experiment tested this claim using the topic of statistics,…

Two experiments examined the possibility that children and adults possess a single-object/single-motion intuition. This intuition involves the view that all parts of a rigid object must move at the same speed because they all move together. (RH)

Noting that children and adults often hold misconceptions about topics in content area texts, particularly those in the area of science where counter-intuitive notions about how the real world works abound, a study examined the effect of activating students' background knowledge about motion theory prior to asking them to read a physics text.…