To investigate how physics students perceived the sudden shift to online learning at the beginning of COVID-19 pandemic, 18 semistructured interviews were conducted with university students in Austria, Croatia, and Germany. Based on the interviews, a questionnaire was developed and data from N ¼ 578 physics students from five universities in…

The increasing and diversifying student enrollments in introductory physics courses make reliable, valid, and usable instruments for measuring student skills and gains ever more important. In introductory physics, in addition to teaching facts about mechanics, we also seek to teach our students the skills of "thinking like a physicist,"…

Education research has repeatedly shown that active learning in physics is pedagogically more efficient than traditional lecture courses. Widespread application of the active learning is slowed down by the lack of data on the performance of the active learning in widely varying circumstances of different educational systems. We measured the level…

In this paper we put forth a model for physics course reform that uniquely uses proven, research-based active-learning strategies to help students improve their physics knowledge and problem-solving skills. In this study, we compared the exam performance of students in two sections of the same introductory physics course. One section (the…

The COVID-19 Pandemic interrupted university activities at the beginning of the first semester of 2020, forcing the academic community to reinvent itself to meet the determinations of social isolation. The use of assistive technologies such as information and communication technologies has never been more welcome. However, for a college student…

Undergraduate physics programs are increasingly facing pressure from university and college administration, industry, and funding agencies to improve training of our undergraduates. Increasingly, tertiary institutions have redefined their graduate profiles and mission statements to encompass more than just content knowledge, including skills that…

Engaging Electrical Engineering (EE) students in a freshman general physics service course is challenging as they see little relationship between the topics and their major. Non-native speakers enrolled in a course taught in English face an additional challenge beyond understanding the basic physics, that is, understanding specialized English.…

Homework gives students an opportunity to practice important college-level physics skills. A switch to Web-based homework alters the nature of feedback received, potentially changing the pedagogical benefit. Calculus- and algebra-based introductory physics students enrolled in large paired lecture sections at a public university completed homework…

To help engage non-physics majors in a General Physics II (Electricity & Magnetism) course at the University of Indianapolis, students used their smartphones to detect magnetic fields on campus in a semester-long data collection project. This paper discusses details about the design of the project, previous studies that utilize smartphones for…

Since physics is often a service course for college students, it is important to incorporate everyday examples in the curriculum that inspire students of diverse backgrounds and interests. In this regard, baseball has been a workhorse for the physics classroom for a long time, taking the form of demonstrations and example problems. In this…

Abstractor's analyses of 12 science education research studies focusing on science instruction are presented. These include: (1) use of Learning Environment Inventory in junior high school classrooms organized for individualized instruction; (2) microteaching and strategy analysis as used in a science methods course; (3) comparison of two…

PhysPort (www.physport.org) has become the go-to place for physics educators to learn to apply research-­based teaching and assessment in their classrooms. Usage (defined as the total number of visits) has doubled every two years since the site was released in 2011, and 20% of all U.S. physics faculty and 7% of U.S. high school physics teachers…

A central goal of introductory physics for the life sciences (IPLS) is to prepare students to use physics to model and analyze biological situations, a skill of increasing importance for their future studies and careers. Here we report our findings on life science students' ability to carry out a sophisticated biological modeling task at the end…

STEM fields, such as physics, increasingly rely on complex programs to analyse large datasets, thus teaching students the required programming skills is an important component of all STEM curricula. Since undergraduate students often have no prior coding experience, they are reliant on error messages as the primary diagnostic tool to identify and…

This study examined the influence of higher education teacher training on student physics teachers' progression in content knowledge (CK). To become experts, student teachers must acquire both declarative and procedural -- conditional CK. This progression is generally characterized by the prerequisite role of declarative knowledge, meaning that…