Many researchers have documented the difficulties for learners of different ages and preparations in understanding basic astronomical concepts. Traditional instructional strategies and communication media do not seem to be effective in producing meaningful understanding, or even induce misconceptions and misinterpretations. In line with recent…

Students' misconceptions concerning colour phenomena and the apparent complexity of the underlying concepts--due to the different domains of knowledge involved--make its teaching very difficult. We have developed and tested a teaching device, the addition table of colours (ATC), that encompasses additive and subtractive mixtures in a single…

Comparing two objects falling together is a small-scale version of Galileo's classical experiment, demonstrating the equivalence between gravitational and inertial mass. We present here investigations by a group of ten-year-olds, who used iPads to record the drops. The movie recordings were essential in the follow-up discussions, enabling the…

We propose a simple, direct estimate of the Sun's diameter based on penumbra observation and measurement in a two-level approach, the first for middle-school pupils and making use of simple geometrical arguments, the second more appropriate to high-school students and based on a slightly more sophisticated approach. (Contains 5 figures.)

This research is conducted among 65 seventh graders (12-14 years old) who attend introductory course on physics. Tests and interviews are used to trace the roots of the students' misconceptions about mass. Results from the research reveal serious weaknesses in students' understanding of concept of mass, and its confusion with concepts of…

A low-cost celestial globe is developed to support astronomical coordinate learning. It is used for demonstrating how stars are positioned and to analyse the motion of celestial bodies or diurnal motion. The model was implemented at a weekend astronomy camp provided for students from schools in the northeastern region of Thailand. A series of…

This study describes an approach for blind students thought health physics about how they could set a hypothesis and test it. The participant of the study used some health materials designed for high school blind student and tested her hypothesis with the data she gathered with those materials. It was asked that she should hypothesize which could…

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 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…

There are many hypotheses regarding factors that may encourage female students to pursue careers in the physical sciences. Using multivariate matching methods on national data drawn from the Persistence Research in Science and Engineering (PRiSE) project ("n" = 7505), we test the following five commonly held beliefs regarding what…

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…

The concept of interaction that underlies Newton's Laws of Motion is compared with the students' commonsense ideas of force and motion. An approach to teaching Newton's Third Law of Motion is suggested that focuses on refining the student's intuitive thinking on the nature of interaction.

Various properties of polymers can be demonstrated using these simple tricks and recipes that were previously described in the 2002/3 IOP Schools and Colleges Lecture.

Teachers looking for simple objects with which to explore physics could do a lot worse than return to the toys of their youth. Toys can capture students' attention, and many toys will behave in ways that can be used to explain forces, motion, electricity etc.

We describe an intriguing genre of assignment in which students respond to a fake scientific paper by designing an experiment to test its claims. Put another way, we ask students to be experimentalists, albeit in an artificially controlled and prescribed domain; we hope that through this, students get a better picture of what science is about and…