Visual representations play a critical role in teaching physics. However, since we do not have a satisfactory understanding of how visual perception impacts the construction of abstract knowledge, most visual representations used in instructions are either created based on existing conventions or designed according to the instructor's…

As interdisciplinary courses are developed, instructors and researchers have to grapple with questions of how students should make connections across disciplines. We explore the issue of interdisciplinary reconciliation (IDR): how students reconcile seemingly contradictory ideas from different disciplines. While IDR has elements in common with…

In traditional teaching, the fundamental concepts of electromagnetic induction are usually quickly analyzed, spending most of the time solving problems in a more or less rote manner. However, physics education research has shown that the fundamental concepts of the electromagnetic induction theory are barely understood by students. This article…

Discipline-based science concept assessments are powerful tools to measure learners' disciplinary core ideas. Among many such assessments, the Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment (BEMA) has been broadly used to gauge student conceptions of key electricity and magnetism (E&M) topics in college-level introductory physics courses.…

This paper describes an investigation into student reasoning about potential energy in the context of introductory electrostatics. Similar incorrect reasoning patterns emerged both in written questions administered after relevant instruction and in one-on-one interviews. These reasoning patterns are also prevalent in responses to questions posed…

Teaching about energy in interdisciplinary settings that emphasize coherence among physics, chemistry, and biology leads to a more central role for chemical bond energy. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to chemical energy leads to modeling chemical bonds in terms of negative energy. While recent work on ontological metaphors for energy…

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…

This paper is the first part of a multiphase study examining students' mental models about the quantization of physical observables--light, energy, and angular momentum. Thirty-one second-year physics and physics education college students who were taking a modern physics course participated in the study. The qualitative analysis of data…

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,…

As has been shown by previous research, students may possess various misconceptions in the area of thermal physics. In order to help them overcome misconceptions observed prior to instruction, we implemented a one-hour lecture-based intervention in their introductory thermal physics course. The intervention was held after the conventional lectures…

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"…

The nature of energy is not typically an explicit topic of physics instruction. Nonetheless, verbal and graphical representations of energy articulate models in which energy is conceptualized as a quasimaterial substance, a stimulus, or a vertical location. We argue that a substance ontology for energy is particularly productive in developing…

The Energy Project at Seattle Pacific University has developed representations that embody the substance metaphor and support learners in conserving and tracking energy as it flows from object to object and changes form. Such representations enable detailed modeling of energy dynamics in complex physical processes. We assess student learning by…

We have been piloting web-based multimedia learning modules (MLMs), developed by the Physics Education Research Group at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC), as a "prelecture assignment" in several introductory physics courses at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona. In this study, we report the results from a…

Novice problem solvers are rather sensitive to surface problem features, and they often resort to trial and error formula matching rather than identifying an appropriate solution approach. These observations have been interpreted to imply that novices structure their knowledge according to surface features rather than according to problem type…