Previous work has looked at the relationship between high school preparation and student performance in calculus-based introductory mechanics (physics 1) courses. Here, we extend that work to look at performance in introductory calculus-based electricity and magnetism (physics 2), and we look at the significance of what college math courses have…

Existing research identifying common student ideas about forces focuses on students' misunderstandings, misconceptions, and difficulties. In this paper, we characterize student thinking in terms of resources, framing student thinking as continuous with formal physics. Based on our analysis of 2048 written responses to conceptual questions, we…

We add to a growing literature suggesting that demographic grade gaps should be attributed to biases embedded in the courses themselves. Changes in the structure of two different introductory physics classes were made while leaving the topics covered and the level of coverage unchanged. First, a class where conceptual issues were studied before…

Error analysis consumes much of the focus in introductory physics labs. Catastrophic cancellation is a spike in error that occurs when subtracting two measurements of roughly equal magnitude. Often termed "loss of significance" or "subtractive cancellation," this effect can easily relegate experimental results to utter…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Curriculum Development: Theory into Design.] A level of curricular design, called "design tactics," is identified to fill a gap in the research literature between the broad principles that guide curriculum development and the detailed writing of specific activities and lessons. The use of…

Existing accounts of student thinking about mechanical wave propagation and superposition emphasize that students sometimes treat wave pulses as objects, saying, for example, that pulses bounce off of one another when they meet. In this paper, we present a context in which students explicitly reason about pulses as not-objects, instead describing…

Women in physics and engineering continue to remain underrepresented in higher education. To illuminate underlying processes, we used data from undergraduate Physics students (N= 338) enrolled in an introductory physics course to investigate the development of field belonging and its association with gender and perceived competence. Latent change…

In the spring of 2018 the Northern California/Nevada Section of the American Association of Physics Teachers was alerted to a local high school's plans to eliminate physics for the following school year. As part of the campaign to support the school's efforts to sustain physics in the following year, the physics offerings from the surrounding…

We present an investigation into the interdisciplinary role of physics in a physics-for-nonphysicists course at Pomona College. This work is guided by prior research into introductory physics for life science (IPLS) courses, but attends to significant differences in the scope and context of this course. We interviewed enrolled students, physics…

In this article, the authors describe their use of simultaneous observations of the 2016 transit of Mercury made from two widely separated locations on Earth to determine the distance to the Sun in a way different from that suggested in 1715 by Halley. Using an internet link, teachers and students can make a similar derivation at the 2019 transit…

Much work has been done to characterize the reasoning of students as they solve mathematics-intensive problems and characterizing differences in expert and novice problem solving. In this work, we characterize the problem-solving strategies in a classroom setting of "transitioning novices," students who have completed an introductory…

In 2018, in response to the proposed elimination of physics at a predominately Hispanic and socioeconomically disadvantaged (SED) high school, the Northern California/Nevada chapter of the AAPT investigated school demographics and their effect on physics offerings in public high schools in our region. As access was a key issue, the focus was on…

Given the insufficient number of well-qualified future physics teachers in the U.S., physics programs often seek guidance for how to address this national need. Measurement tools can provide such guidance, by both defining excellence in physics teacher education (PTE) and providing a means to measure progress towards excellence. This paper…

We introduce a template to (i) scaffold the problem solving process for students in the physics 1 course, and (ii) serve as a generic rubric for measuring how expertlike students are in their problem solving. This template is based on empirical studies of the problem solving practices of expert scientists and engineers, unlike most existing…

Analyzing, constructing, and translating between graphical, pictorial, and mathematical representations of physics ideas and reasoning flexibly through them ("representational competence") is a key characteristic of expertise in physics but is a challenge for learners to develop. Interactive computer simulations and University of…