This paper surveys research over the past decade on school group visits to museums. By shifting attention to students' views about field trips, to their socially negotiated learning behaviors during field trips and the interaction between learning in the classroom and in the museum, this research has afforded a deeper understanding of the nature…

In recognition of the fact that science centers and other informal educational institutions can play a role in the reform of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, several major research and professional programs are currently underway. This article discusses one such effort, the Center for Informal Learning and…

This paper presents two perspectives that the author believes will contribute to an enhanced ability to describe and understand learning from museums. Arguably, a major strength of the past decade of research on learning from museums has been the description and investigation of many of the myriad factors that appear to influence learning from…

Modern visualization techniques in science education present a challenge of sorting out the contributions of perception to understanding science. These contributions range over degrees to which perception is influenced by belief (including systematic sets of beliefs which comprise scientific theories) and social setting. This paper proposes a…

Galileo's discovery of the properties of pendulum motion depended on his adoption of the novel methodology of idealisation. Galileo's laws of pendulum motion could not be accepted until the empiricist methodological constraints placed on science by Aristotle, and by common sense, were overturned. As long as scientific claims were judged by how the…

This paper conveys information about a Physics laboratory experiment for students with some theoretical knowledge about oscillatory motion. Students construct a simple pendulum that behaves as an ideal one, and analyze model assumption incidence on its period. The following aspects are quantitatively analyzed: vanishing friction, small amplitude,…

We show that the treatment of pendulum movement, other than the linear approximation,may be an instructive experimentally based introduction to the physics of non-linear effects. Firstly the natural frequency of a gravitational pendulum is measured as function of its amplitude. Secondly forced oscillations of a gravitational pendulum are…

Leon Foucault's dramatic demonstration of the rotation of the Earth using a freely-rotating pendulum in 1850 shocked the world of science. Scientists were stunned that such a simple proof of our planet's rotation had to wait so long to be developed. Foucault's public demonstration, which was repeated at many locations around the world, put an end…

This article refers to a framework to teach the philosophy of science to prospective and in-service science teachers. This framework includes two components: a list of the main schools of twentieth-century philosophy of science (called "stages") and a list of their main theoretical ideas (called "strands"). In this paper, I show that two of these…

Phenomena associated with the "pendulum" present numerous opportunities for assessing higher order human capabilities related to "scientific inquiry" and the "discovery" of natural law. This paper illustrates how systematic "assessment of scientific inquiry capabilities", using "pendulum" phenomena, can provide a useful tool for classroom teachers…

This article explores the relationship between specific cultural events such as Galileo's work with the pendulum and a curriculum design that seeks to establish in skeletal form a comprehensive epic narrative about the co-evolution of cultural systems and human consciousness. The article explores some of the challenges and some of the strategies…

In these studies, a vegetable can containing fluid was swung as a pendulum by supporting its end-lips with a pair of knife edges. The motion was measured with a capacitive sensor and the logarithmic decrement in free decay was estimated from computer-collected records. Measurements performed with nine different homogeneous liquids, distributed…

Articles about the pendulum in four journals devoted to the teaching of physics and one general science teaching journal (along with other miscellaneous articles from other journals) are listed in three broad categories--types of pendulums, the contexts in which these pendulums are used in physics teaching at secondary or tertiary levels and a…

As part of a first-year college Introductory Physics course, I have students construct an Excel[R]: spreadsheet based on the differential equation for pendulum motion (we take a pendulum having a light bar rather than a string, so it can go "over the top"). In extensive discussions with the students, I find that forcing them to make the…

The discovery of the near isochrony of the simple pendulum offered the possibility of measuring time intervals more accurately than had been possible before. However,the fact that it was not strictly isochronous for all amplitudes remained a problem. The cycloidal pendulum provided this strict isochrony and, over a thirty year period from 1659 the…