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…

Limiting case analysis (LCA) is important to practicing physicists. Yet, there is little concrete guidance for physics educators, and a lack of consensus in the research community about how to help students learn, and learn from, limiting case analysis. In this study, we first review existing literature to find commonalities and variations in how…

Physics education research over the past few decades has made significant advances toward improving instructional practices and developing effective instructional materials for physics classrooms. In some contexts, however, after multiple instructional refinements difficulties can remain persistent. Recent findings in PER suggest that many of…

Student cognition in response to intuitive and counterintuitive stimuli in the school science curriculum is not well understood. To address this issue, this study examines high school students' cognitive responses to three counterintuitive physics problems. Our analysis reveals that student success in arriving at counter-intuitive physical…

This paper presents the assessment items that were developed by science and technology teachers in Québec to explore their students' alternative ideas about engineering design technology and technological systems. These assessment items were administered to Secondary Cycle One students in Francophone and Anglophone schools in Québec to elicit…

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…

In response to the authors, I demonstrate how threshold concepts offer a means to both contextualise teaching and learning of quantum physics and help transform students into the culture of physics, and as a way to identify particularly troublesome concepts within quantum physics. By drawing parallels from my own doctoral research in another area…

Humans have evolved to follow their intuition, but as any high school physics teacher knows, relying on intuition often leads students to predict outcomes that are at odds with evidence. Over the years, we have attempted to make this intuition-outcome disparity a central theme running throughout our physics classes, with limited success. Part of…

Humans have evolved to follow their intuition, but as any high school physics teacher knows, relying on intuition often leads students to predict outcomes that are at odds with evidence. Over the years, we have attempted to make this intuition-outcome disparity a central theme running throughout our physics classes, with limited success. Part of…

The research field of intuitive physics focuses on discrepancies between theoretical and intuitive physical knowledge. Consideration of these discrepancies can help in the teaching of elementary physics. However, evidence shows that theoretical and intuitive physical knowledge may also be congruent. Physics teaching could further benefit from…

In this study, the intuitive physics of free fall was explored using Information Integration Theory and Functional Measurement. The participants had to rate the speed of objects differing in mass and height of release at the end of an imagined free fall. According to physics, falling speed increases with height of release but it is substantially…

Although a large part the Physics Education Research (PER) literature investigates students' conceptual understanding in physics, these investigations focus on qualitative, conceptual reasoning. Even in modeling expert problem solving, attention to conceptual understanding means a focus on initial qualitative analysis of the problem; the equations…

More than a thousand Grade 10 Physical Science learners from four South African provinces participated in a study that probed their conceptions of energy. The purpose was to determine the learners' conceptual resources, i.e. their initial conceptions, and identify the potentially productive resources from which they may construct physics concepts.…

This article explores 11- to 16-year-old students' explanations for phenomena commonly studied in school chemistry from an inclusive cognitive resources or knowledge-in-pieces perspective that considers that student utterances may reflect the activation of knowledge elements at a range of levels of explicitness. We report 5 themes in student…

The present research deals with the perception of matter in young children, inquiring if it is perceived as discrete or continuous. It investigates the existence of the intuitive rule "everything can be divided in two" in elementary school children (K-6) by using questions on the subdivision of mathematical and material objects. In addition, we…