Short metacognitive prompts--like "minute papers"--are simple enough to be widely adopted by instructors. But do they work? We investigate how they affect college students' performance in quantitative (Physics) and qualitative (Psychology) courses, comparing classes which received metacognitive prompts to those that did not. We find…

The authors describe a Modeling Instruction program that places an emphasis on the construction and application of conceptual models of physical phenomena as a central aspect of learning and doing science. (Contains 1 table.)

Textbooks play an important part in the instructional process. The purposes of this study were to develop an instrument to identify the characteristics of high school physics textbooks, and examine how appropriate the currently used textbooks were for teaching and learning physics. The criteria were identified and the instrument was developed with…

Discussed are the applications of counting techniques of a sorting game to distributions and concepts in statistical mechanics. Included are the following distributions: Fermi-Dirac, Bose-Einstein, and most probable. (RH)

Presents a simple classical method of describing spin resonance in terms of average power absorbed. (SL)

Describes a technique for bypassing complications in finding the energy eigenfunctions and eigenvalues of a charged (spinless) particle in a uniform magnetic field. (SL)

Presents an alternative approach for deriving the perturbation formulas for the energy in quantum mechanics. The procedure focuses on the solution of the secular equation D(E)=O, and then derives the first-, second-, and third-order formulas by the same method. (GA)

States and proves some useful identities in normal ordering. The identities can be very useful in ordinary quantum-mechanicaland many-body problems. (Author/GA)

Gives an explicit and elementary proof that the radial energy eigenfunctions for the hydrogen atom in quantum mechanics, bound and scattering states included, form a complete set. The proof uses some properties of the confluent hypergeometric functions and the Cauchy residue theorem from analytic function theory. (Author/GA)

There were no differences in the understanding of physical optics and ability to solve physical optics problems after instruction or on a delayed test between students with or without prior instruction in wave motion. (AL)

Formulas are derived for the energy, momentum, and angular momentum transmitted by waves of arbitrary shape in an inextensible string by pure transverse waves in a string using Tait's procedure. (Author/CP)

The characteristic features of the Maxwell-Botzmann energy distribution function and its variation with temperature are demonstrated using visual displays and simple counting techniques. (DT)