The introductory phase of studying physics poses a wide range of challenging problems to new students. One of them is learning physics on a new, more abstract and highly mathematised level, at high speed, in a lowly regulated learning environment. While several German universities have taken action to mitigate these problems, much knowledge about…

The purpose of this study was to identify the the factors that influenced pre-service teachers' perceptions of their abilities to solve structured physics problems. 1185 pre-service teachers from different disciplines, enrolled in physics courses in one Turkish University from 2008 to 2017 participated in a descriptive survey. The factors…

This November marks another anniversary of the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, an example appropriate to introductory science or physical sciences courses from grade school to university. The purpose of this brief submission is to add an element to this story, which, despite having been mentioned before, has not received the prominence it…

The evaluation of research to allocate government funding to universities is now common across the globe. "The Research Excellence Framework," introduced in the UK in 2014, marked a major change by extending assessment beyond the 'quality' of published research to include its real-world 'impact'. Impact submissions were a key determinant…

The creation of new knowledge in the form of scientific models is a cornerstone of the process of science. In physics laboratory instruction, students are very often stuck in a confirmatory mindset; they have been conditioned to believe that the role of experimentation in the classroom and in the world is to verify known facts. This mindset is…

Creativity has been identified as an increasingly important graduate attribute for employment in the 21st century. As sites of significant development of disciplinary specialization, universities seem to be the natural place for creativity to be fostered. However, there remain contestations and ambiguities in the ways creativity is theorized, and…

The difference between students' ideas and scientific conceptions, is called misconceptions. Physics learning needs to be designed by teachers to eradicate misconceptions. This paper provides a review of 72 international journal articles on diagnosis methods, causes, and ways of remediating misconceptions that have been published between…

Teaching physics in real-life contexts continues to be a challenge for teachers at different educational levels. In this article, three context-rich problems are proposed to be implemented in the classroom for higher education, using the explosion that occurred in Beirut as a case study. These problems require the search and analysis of real data,…

Students ability to build correct knowledge relies on their understanding of concepts. Students must understand the concept well before applying it in real-life situations. With the advent of technology, teaching and learning quantum physics has been made easier and more effective in enhancing students' critical thinking and conceptual…

The current study assesses the effect of using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) with the specific goal of providing remedial education. The data refer to an Italian flagship university, Politecnico di Milano, where a MOOC platform was launched following the strategy 'MOOCs to bridge the gaps'. Hence, the study aims at assessing the effect of…

Background: While there have been numerous calls to increase the participation of people with disabilities in STEM, many postsecondary institutions are not equipped to support students with disabilities. We examined the accessibility of 139 webpages from 73 postsecondary institutions in the USA that contained information about the undergraduate…

This paper offers a perspective on the relationship between communities that conduct research on teaching and learning in higher education, focusing on Higher Education Studies (HES) and science Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER). The paper responds to HES debates about the strength of its epistemological base and who belongs to that…

Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students' abilities to intertwine important concepts with practices in which scientists engage. In addition to evaluating…

When the road is wet (there is a water layer on the road surface), the road marks become blurred and drivers are distracted. We discuss the contributing processes and identify which processes are dominant to the occurrence of this phenomenon. Modelling and a simple experiment demonstrate that the dominant processes are: (a) refraction of light by…

I begin this manuscript by taking the assumption that addressing issues of diversity in physics higher education (PHE) in the United States is a priority for institutional, departmental, and individual policy and practice. These issues encompass a symptom--the inequitable distributions of diverse student populations in physics in comparison with…