To measure the impact of fine arts instruction in HISD [Houston Independent School District] , the study compared the STAAR [State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness] performance, attendance, and disciplinary outcomes of fine arts students enrolled in Fine Arts Magnet schools (treatment group) with students enrolled in non-Fine Arts Magnet…

Magnet schools were originally created to attract a diverse student population. Using data from the 23 magnet schools in St. Louis, this longitudinal study is twofold: first, to review the performance outcomes of the magnet schools across a 5-year period, between 2005-2006 and 2009-2010, and second, to examine whether the magnet schools are…

Knowledge is not simply a collection of facts, principles, and formulas; instead, meaningful knowledge is organized around core concepts that guide peoples' thinking about a subject. Therefore, knowledge organization is recognized as an important component of understanding learning and teaching. In this research, knowledge organization of two…

The paper describes a set of physics demonstration experiments where thermal sensitive foils are used for the detection of the two dimensional distribution of temperature. The method is used for the demonstration of thermal conductivity, temperature change in adiabatic processes, distribution of electromagnetic radiation in a microwave oven and…

The speed of light, or more generally, the speed of electromagnetic waves, seems to be incredibly high. 300 000 km s[superscript -1] is far greater than the typical speed of a car, a plane or even a rocket, which is just several kilometres per second. It is thus natural that we treat the speed of light as infinite in everyday life. It appears,…

The magneto-kinematic effect has been previously observed for the case of a rotating permanent magnet. Using this effect, this paper presents a novel method for calculation of the induced electromotive force (EMF) in a conductor for the case of rectilinear motion of a 25.4 mm diameter permanently magnetized sphere (magnetic dipole) past the…

I describe an elementary way of introducing electromagnetic field momentum. By considering a system of a long solenoid and line charge, the dependence of the field momentum on the electric and magnetic fields can be deduced. I obtain the electromagnetic angular momentum for a point charge and magnetic monopole pair partially through dimensional…

We consider two different forms for a relativistic version of a linear restoring force. The pair comes from taking Hooke's law to be the force appearing on the right-hand side of the relativistic expressions: d"p"/d"t" or d"p"/d["tau"]. Either formulation recovers Hooke's law in the non-relativistic limit. In addition to these two forces, we…

In this paper we demonstrate a surprising aspect of quantum mechanics that is accessible to an undergraduate student. We discuss probability backflow for an electron in a constant magnetic field. It is shown that even for a wavepacket composed entirely of states with negative angular momentum the effective angular momentum can take on positive…

We explore the consequences of a force density, [image omitted], studied by some authors, for the device designed by Lai (1980 "Am. J. Phys. 48" 658) to analyse which definition of electromagnetic momentum density, either Minkowski's or Abraham's, is consistent with mechanical torques that arise from the change in time of a magnetic field, which…

In a recent "TPT" article, I addressed a common miscommunication about Faraday's law, namely, that introductory texts often say the law expresses a causal relationship between the magnetic fields time variation and the electric fields circulation. In that article, I demonstrated that these field behaviors share a common cause in a time-varying…

School choice reform rests on the notion that competition amongst schools will produce more efficient schools and improve the educational system as a whole. This study focused on the impact of school choice competition on school principals in both magnet schools and traditional public schools in a midsized district in Florida. This study examined…

Students in first-year physics courses generally focus on hunting for suitable equations and formulas when tackling a variety of physical situations and physics problems. There is a need for a framework that can guide them to disciplinary ways of thinking and help them begin to think like physicists. To serve this end, in this study, a framework…

Understanding what happens at the particulate level when ionic compounds dissolve in water is difficult for many students, yet this understanding is critical in explaining many macroscopic observations. This article describes a student-centered activity designed to help strengthen students' conceptual understanding of this process at the…

It is known that observers comoving with a uniformly accelerated point charge detect the electromagnetic field of a charge as a static electric field. We show that one can find a similar family of observers, which detect the field of a charge as a static electric field, in the general case of arbitrary point-charge motion. We find the velocities…