We have studied the correlation of student performance in a large first year university physics course with their reasons for taking the course and whether or not the student took a senior-level high school physics course. Performance was measured both by the Force Concept Inventory and by the grade on the final examination. Students who took the…

This article describes the development and field test of the Sound Concept Inventory Instrument (SCII), designed to measure middle school students' concepts of sound. The instrument was designed based on known students' difficulties in understanding sound and the history of science related to sound and focuses on two main aspects of…

This longitudinal study reports the results of a replication of "Tutorials in Introductory Physics" in high schools of a Latin-American country. The main objective of this study was to examine the suitability of "Tutorials" for local science education reform. Conceptual learning of simple resistive electric circuits was…

Aiming at a deep understanding of some basic concepts of electric circuits in lower secondary schools, this work introduces an analogy between the behavior of children playing in a school yard with a central lake, subject to different conditions, rules, and stimuli, and Drude's free electron model of metals. Using this analogy from the first…

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) require teachers to understand aspects of energy degradation and the second law of thermodynamics, including energy's availability and usefulness, changes in energy concentration, and the tendency of energy to spread uniformly. In an effort to develop learning goals that support teachers in…

Earlier research has shown that after physics instruction, many students have difficulties with the force concept, and with constructing free-body diagrams (FBDs). It has been suggested that treating forces as interactions could help students to identify forces as well as to construct the correct FBDs. While there is evidence that identifying…

This paper reports a cross-grade comparative study of Chinese precollege students' epistemological beliefs about physics by using the Colorado Learning Attitudes Survey about Sciences (CLASS). Our students of interest are middle and high schoolers taking traditional lecture-based physics as a mandatory science course each year from the 8th grade…

It has been established by physics education researchers that there is a correlation between the learner's behavior, their epistemological beliefs with which they come to the classrooms, and their success in a course. This study of Indian students and teachers explores expectations and beliefs in learning physics at the secondary and tertiary…

We provide evidence that a learning activity called Energy Theater engages learners with key conceptual issues in the learning of energy, including disambiguating matter flow and energy flow and theorizing mechanisms for energy transformation. A participationist theory of learning, in which learning is indicated by changes in speech and behavior,…

This study reports on a content course for science immersion teacher candidates that emphasized authentic practice of science and thinking scientifically in the context of introductory astrophysics. We explore how 122 science teacher candidates spanning three cohorts did and did not reason scientifically and how this evolved in our program. Our…

For over 30 years, researchers have investigated students' ideas about energy with the intent of reforming instructional practice. In this pursuit, Watts contributed an influential study with his 1983 paper "Some alternative views of energy" ["Phys. Educ." 18, 213 (1983)]. Watts' "alternative frameworks"…

We recently developed a multiple-choice conceptual survey in mechanical waves. The development, evaluation, and demonstration of the use of the survey were reported elsewhere [A. Tongchai et al. Int. J. Sci. Educ. 31 2437 (2009)]. We administered the survey to 902 students from seven different groups ranging from high school to second year…

This paper describes a teaching experiment designed to examine the learning (i.e., retention of content and conceptual development) that takes place when public scientific web lectures delivered by scientists are utilized to present advanced ideas in physics to students with a high school background in physics. The students watched an exemplary…

This study investigates students' ability to interpret multiple representations consistently (i.e., representational consistency) in the context of the force concept. For this purpose we developed the Representational Variant of the Force Concept Inventory (R-FCI), which makes use of nine items from the 1995 version of the Force Concept Inventory…

We describe a methodology for identifying evidence for the use of three types of scientific reasoning. In two case studies of high school physics classes, we used this methodology to identify multiple instances of students using analogies, extreme cases, and Gedanken experiments. Previous case studies of expert scientists have indicated that these…