Many science education researchers have argued that learners' commitment to a substance (matter-based) ontology impedes the learning of scientific concepts that scientists typically conceptualize as processes or interactions, such as force, electric current, and heat. By this account, students' tendency to classify these entities as…

Much research in engineering and physics education has focused on improving students' problem-solving skills. This research has led to the development of step-by-step problem-solving strategies and grading rubrics to assess a student's expertise in solving problems using these strategies. These rubrics value "communication" between the student's…

This study explored how researchers' views about the form of students' epistemologies influence how the researchers develop and refine surveys and how they interpret survey results. After running standard statistical analyses on 505 physics students' responses to the Turkish version of the Maryland Physics Expectations-II survey, probing students'…

Effective physics instruction benefits from respecting the physics ideas that introductory students bring into the classroom. We argue that it is similarly beneficial to respect the teaching ideas that novice physics instructors bring to their classrooms. We present a case study of a tutorial teaching assistant (TA), Alan. When we first examined…

As part of a long-term program to develop effective, research-based professional development programs for physics graduate student teaching assistants (TAs), we first identify their current classroom practices and why they engage in these practices. In this paper, we identify a set of teaching practices we call "focusing on indicators," which…