The study investigated the impact on student motivation and understanding of magnetism of teaching sequences based on an inductive approach. The study was conducted in large lecture classes. A pre- and post-Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism was conducted with just fewer than 700 Thai undergraduate science students, before and after…

This research study sought to identify prominent features of the nature of science (NOS) embedded in authentic scientific inquiry. Fourteen well-established scientists from different parts of the world, working in experimental or theoretical research, in both traditional fields such as astrophysics and rapidly growing research fields such as…

In the atmosphere or on the ground, snow provides students with unique opportunities to discover winter weather patterns. Traditionally, when students study weather, it is limited to the collection of data one would see on a weather report. However, the interdisciplinary Students Synthesizing Snow data in Natural Objective Ways (SSSNOW) project…

This article explores the philosophy and position of the discipline of computer science within the liberal arts, based upon a discussion of the nature of computer science and a review of the characteristics of the liberal arts. A liberal arts environment provides important opportunities for undergraduate programs, but also presents important…

Rapid technological enhancements and changes necessitate people who can understand the relation between science and technology and perceive as well as comment on technological enhancements. The aim of the present study was to determine physics students comprehension of the operation principles of wired telephone, mobile phone, and latest medical…

For the case of objects thrown from an elevated position, students tend to believe an object thrown at an upward angle will always land farther away than one thrown horizontally at the same speed. That this is not always the case comes as a great surprise to many. By analysing the situation of a horizontally-thrown object outdistancing one thrown…

A whiplash event is a relative motion between the head and torso that occurs in rear-end automobile collisions. In particular, the large inertia of the head results in a horizontal translation relative to the thorax. This paper describes a simulation of the motion of the head and neck during a rear-end (whiplash) collision. A head-neck model that…

One of my favorite 19th century electrical scientists is Edward Weston, and one of my favorite devices for teaching the topics of electromagnetic forces and torques is the D'Arsonval galvanometer. The junction of these two topics is Weston's improved meter movement that has been used in analog meters for the past 125 years.

This past semester I brought a Lava Lite[R] Lamp into my classroom. Why bring such a thing into class? Many of today's students are part of the "retro" movement. They buy clothes from the '60s, they wear their hair like people did in the '60s, and they look for the ideals and themes related to living in the 1960s. Physics education reform is also…

In this age of the microcomputer-based lab (MBL), students are quite accustomed to looking at graphs of position, velocity, and acceleration versus time. A number of textbooks argue convincingly that the slope of the velocity graph gives the acceleration, the area under the velocity graph yields the displacement, and the area under the…

The electrical design of the common hair dryer is based almost entirely on relatively simple principles learned in introductory physics classes. Just as biology students dissect a frog to see the principles of anatomy in action, physics students can "dissect" a hair dryer to see how principles of electricity are used in a real system. They can…

Fruit batteries and saltwater batteries are excellent ways to explore simple circuits in the classroom. These are examples of air batteries in which metal reacts with oxygen in the air in order to generate free electrons, which flow through an external circuit and do work. Students are typically told that the salt or fruit water acts as an…

A new method is introduced to study the behaviour of the falling spherical ball in a viscous liquid using the well known Stokes' law. Experimental results are compared with those obtained by numerical calculations. Upper limits on the size and mass of the spherical balls of different materials used in the experiment are presented. (Contains 5…

The nature of science is a complex theme, and continues to be the subject of advanced and ongoing scholarship, drawing upon a range of disciplines. Therefore, whatever is presented in school science as being "the" nature of science must at best be a simplification, and so there is a need to form judgements about which simplifications are…

How successful will you be in guiding a new teacher's professional development? While your success will be influenced by how you and your mentee conceptualize teaching, learning, and the nature of science, research indicates that your success is also highly dependent on how you and your mentee conceptualize mentoring itself. This article describes…