Biblioteca Digital

peer-reviewed; Physics Education Research (PER) has shown that students leave the physics classroom holding the same misconceptions about physics they had when they entered. PER has demonstrated that these misconceptions are often deeply held and are difficult to change. The literature indicates that Peer Learning has advantages compared with traditional methods in producing conceptual change and that there are a number of potential benefits for utilising undergraduates as Peer Leaders in Peer Learning programmes. Gartner, Kohler, and Riessman (1971) summarised a number of beneficial cognitive processes that occur when Peer Leaders prepare for Peer Learning sessions. It is believed that in reviewing, organising and teaching the material, they may gain a better understanding of the subject. However, little or no literature exists on the effect participation has on Peer Leaders or their experience of a Peer Learning programme. In particular, few studies determining the effect of participation on the Peer Leaders in physics at third level exist. The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of becoming a Peer Leader, to investigate the experience of becoming a Peer Leader, and to illuminate the implications of using undergraduate Peer Leaders in physics tutorials at third level. A model of Peer Learning was designed and implemented in physics tutorials at the University of Limerick and the Peer Leaders selected for this study had direct experience of undergraduate introductory physics courses. This Peer Learning model involved students working in cooperative groups with an undergraduate Peer Leader as a facilitator of their learning. Training was provided to the Peer Leaders to ensure that they created an environment where the students were actively and productively engaged with the material and with each other. Action research was chosen as the central methodology of this thesis...

In the present work, an assessment of the Physics research capacity in Chile is presented. For this, the period between 2000 and June 2005 has been studied. In this period almost 200 physicists have contributed to scientific production in terms of ISI publications. Amongst these 200, ~160 correspond to theoretical physicists and only ~40 to experimental physicists; ~178 are men and only ~22 are women. A more detailed analysis shows that ~160 physicists have at least one appearance in ISI publications per year considering the last 3 years. Ten years ago, a similar criteria (at least one appearance per year in ISI articles, considering mobile three-year periods), the number of active physicists in the Chilean community was estimated at 70. Therefore, the Chilean active physicists’ community has doubled in 10 years. There exist 20 centres in which scientific research is developed: 18 university centres, a government institute and a private institute. As regards scientific productivity, both as related to disciplines or research areas, and well as in relation to research centres, it is found that, generally, scientific production, in a particular area in Physics or in a research centre, is directly related to the number of corresponding researchers; that is to say...

The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows, on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to understand plausible ways on which the brain processes scientific information so that scientific thinking skills could be taught more effectively. As physics is a subject in which mathematical and conceptual reasoning can not be separated, instructors of physics face the problem of finding suitable advise on the most effective methods of teaching physics (i.e. how much time should be spent on intuitive conceptual reasoning and how much time in developing quantitative reasoning, and how to teach both in a unitary way). In spite the important efforts made by the PER community, the published results are overwhelming and confusing for the physics instructors in the sense that the conclusions that have arisen in those articles are in some instances controversial and far from being conclusive in pointing out a particular strategy to overcome the afore mentioned problem. Accordingly, based on the analysis of published PER work, we'll be arguing that one of the major difficulties to overcome in the teaching of physics could be associated to the lack of a consistent and coherent methodological framework for teaching which integrates both aspects...

The present issue of the series <> represents the Proceedings of the Students Training Contest Olympiad in Mathematical and Theoretical Physics and includes the statements and the solutions of the problems offered to the participants. The contest Olympiad was held on May 21st-24th, 2010 by Scientific Research Laboratory of Mathematical Physics of Samara State University, Steklov Mathematical Institute of Russia's Academy of Sciences, and Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (State University) in cooperation. The present Proceedings is intended to be used by the students of physical and mechanical-mathematical departments of the universities, who are interested in acquiring a deeper knowledge of the methods of mathematical and theoretical physics, and could be also useful for the persons involved in teaching mathematical and theoretical physics.; Comment: 68 pages, Proceedings of the statements and solutions of the problems of the Students Training Contest Olympiad in Mathematical and Theoretical Physics. The subjects covered by the problems include classical mechanics, integrable nonlinear systems, probability, integral equations, PDE, quantum and particle physics, cosmology...

The "High school class for students with special abilities in physics" was founded in Nis, Serbia (http://tesla.pmf.ni.ac.rs/f_odeljenje/) in 2003. The basic aim of this project has been introducing a broadened curriculum of physics, mathematics, computer science, as well as chemistry and biology. Now, eight years after establishing of this specialized class, we present analyses of the pupils' skills in solving rather problem oriented test, as PISA test, and compare their results with the results of pupils who study under standard curricula. Also, an external evaluation conducted more recently, shows that Special physics class students performed higher on science knowledge test in comparison with students from control groups (grammar school and special math class students). Establishing of the Special physics class as an interesting educational experiment and its development has been connected, in a sense, with activities of the Southeastern European Network in Mathematical and Theoretical Physics. We present the main achievements of the Network and their possible impact to the students. We make conclusions and remarks that may be useful for the future work that aims to increase pupils' intrinsic and instrumental motivation for physics and sciences...

We describe an initiative at the University of Bonn, where the students develop and perform a 2 hour physics show for school classes and the general public. The show is entertaining and educational and is aimed at children aged 10 and older. For the physics students this is a unique experience to apply their knowledge at an early stage and gives them the chance to develop skills in the public presentation of science, in front of 520 people per show. We have extended the activity to put on an elementary particle physics show for teenagers. Furthermore, local high schools have picked up the idea; their students put on similar shows for fellow students and parents. We would be interested in hearing about related activities elsewhere.; Comment: 6 Pages, LateX, 3 Figures. High quality figures available from author. Journal submission notice added

To deepen do-it-yourself (DIY) technology in the physics classroom, we seek to highlight the Open Source Physics (OSP) community of educators that engage, enable and empower teachers as learners so that we create DIY technology tools-simulation for inquiry learning. We learn through Web 2 online collaborative means to develop simulations together with reputable physicists through the open source digital library. By examining the open source codes of the simulation through the Easy Java Simulation (EJS) toolkit, we are able make sense of the physics from the computational models created by practicing physicists. We will share newer (2010-present) simulations that we have remixed from existing library of simulations models into suitable learning environments for inquiry of physics. We hope other teachers would find these simulations useful and remix them that suit their own context and contribute back to benefit all humankind, becoming citizens for the world. Abstract Footnotes: website prior to the meeting http://www.phy.ntnu.edu.tw/ntnujava/index.php?board=28.0 *Extension of Wee, L. K. (2010, 20 July). Physics Educators as Designers of Simulation using Easy Java Simulation (EJS). Paper presented at the American Association of Physics Teachers National Meeting Conference: 2010 Summer Meeting...

During the last decade we have witnessed an impressive development in so-called interpreted languages and computational environments such as Maple, Mathematica, IDL, Matlab etc. Problems which until recently were typically solved on mainframe machines and written in computing languages such as Fortran or C/C++, can now easily be solved on standard PCs with the bonus of immediate visualizations of the results. In our undergraduate programs an often posed question is how to incorporate and exploit efficiently these advances in the standard physics and mathematics curriculum, without detracting the attention from the classical and basic theoretical and experimental topics to be covered. Furthermore, if students are trained to use such tools at early stages in their education, do such tools really enhance and improve the learning environment? And, perhaps even more important, does it lead to a better physics understanding? Here we present one possible approach, where computational topics are gradually baked into our undergraduate curriculum in Mathematics and Physics, Astronomy and Meteorology. We focus on training our students to use general programming tools in solving physics problems, in addition to the classical analytic problems. By this approach...

We report on theoretical courses by Fermi and Majorana, giving evidence of the first appearance and further development of Quantum Mechanics teaching in Italy. On the basis of original documents, we make a comparison between Fermi's and Majorana's approaches. A detailed analysis is carried out of Fermi's course on Theoretical Physics attended by Majorana in 1927-28. Three (previously unknown) programs on advanced Physics courses submitted by Majorana to the University of Rome between 1933 and 1936 and the course he held in Naples in 1938 complete our analysis: Fermi's phenomenological approach resounded in Majorana, who however combined it with a deeper theoretical approach, closer to the modern way of presenting Quantum Mechanics.; Comment: latex, 21 pages; a contribution in the centenary of the birth of Ettore Majorana

The human mind is endowed with innate primordial perceptions such as space, distance, motion, change, flow of time, matter. The field of cognitive science argues that the abstract concepts of mathematics are not Platonic, but are built in the brain from these primordial perceptions, using what are known as conceptual metaphors. Known cognitive mechanisms give rise to the extremely precise and logical language of mathematics. Thus all of the vastness of mathematics, with its beautiful theorems, is human mathematics. It resides in the mind, and is not `out there'. Physics is an experimental science in which results of experiments are described in terms of concrete concepts - these concepts are also built from our primordial perceptions. The goal of theoretical physics is to describe the experimentally observed regularity of the physical world in an unambiguous, precise and logical manner. To do so, the brain resorts to the well-defined abstract concepts which the mind has metaphored from our primordial perceptions. Since both the concrete and the abstract are derived from the primordial, the connection between physics and mathematics is not mysterious, but natural. This connection is established in the human brain, where a small subset of the vast human mathematics is cognitively fitted to describe the regularity of the universe. Theoretical physics should be thought of as a branch of mathematics...

The dissertation brings together approaches across the fields of physics, critical theory, literary studies, philosophy of physics, sociology of science, and history of science to synthesize a hybrid approach for instigating more rigorous and intense cross-disciplinary interrogations between the sciences and the humanities. There are two levels of conversations going on in the dissertation; at the first level, the discussion is centered on a critical historiography and philosophical implications of the discovery Higgs boson in relation to its position at the intersection of old (current) and the potential for new possibilities in quantum physics; I then position my findings on the Higgs boson in connection to the double-slit experiment that represents foundational inquiries into quantum physics, to demonstrate the bridge between fundamental physics and high energy particle physics. The conceptualization of the variants of the double-slit experiment informs the aforementioned critical comparisons. At the second level of the conversation, theories are produced from a close study of the physics objects as speculative engine for new knowledge generation that are then reconceptualized and re-articulated for extrapolation into the speculative ontology of hard science fiction...

Physics is introduced as a basic matter in the curricula of professional schools (i.e. schools for agriculture, electronic or chemistry experts). Students meet physics in the early years of their training and then continue in vocational subjects where many physics' topics can be useful. Rarely, however, the connection between physics and professional matters is quite explicit. Students often feel physics as boring and useless, i.e. very far from their interests. In these schools it is almost always required the physics lab, but it does not always exist. The physics teachers of a local Agricultural Technical Institute asked us to realize a learning path in laboratory for their students, since in their school the physics lab was missing. This institute is the only public school in the Chianti area specializing in Viticulture and Enology, and attending a further year post diploma, allows the achievement of the qualification of Enologist. We report a learning path realized starting from thermal equilibrium to a full understanding of the measures made with the Malligand's ebulliometer, used for determining the alcoholic strength (alcohol concentration by volume) of an alcoholic beverage and water/alcohol solutions in general. The aim was to make interesting measures of physical quantities...

Physics community is generally concerned about the decrease in Physics enrollment. Due to the deficiency of specially qualified Physics teachers, high school Physics is sometimes taught by general science teachers who may not be trained to motivate students to study Physics. These students will neither be inclined to register into Physics courses nor plan to teach Physics. They will be unable to find out the relevance of Physics with daily life, its application in different disciplines and even the job market. In this situation, we have to carefully make the existing Physics programs more attractive, instead of closing them down. We discuss teaching methodology and course requirements that will help to make Physics programs more attractive and preferable for incoming students. However, we emphasize to set our goals and plan to increase enrollment in parallel steps such as proper information about the program, help in developing a required mathematics background, offering scholarships, teaching assistantship or internships and involving them in research. Also we need to make Physics programs more interesting with the interdisciplinary courses and other electives which students may like. We will have to work on the retention rate to maintain enrollment without compromising on standards. However...

We present outcomes from curricular changes made to an introductory calculus-based physics course whose audience is primarily life science majors, the majority of whom plan to pursue post-baccalaureate studies in medical and scientific fields. During the 2011-12 academic year, we implemented a "Physics of the life sciences" curriculum centered on a draft textbook that takes a novel approach to teaching physics to life science majors. In addition, substantial revisions were made to the homework and hands-on components of the course to emphasize the relationship between physics and the life sciences and to help the students to learn to apply physical intuition to life science-oriented problems. Student learning and attitudinal outcomes were assessed both quantitatively, using standard physics education research instruments, and qualitatively, using student surveys and a series of post-semester interviews. Students experienced high conceptual learning gains, comparable to other active learning-based physics courses. Qualitatively, a substantial fraction of interviewed students reported an increased interest in physics relative to the beginning of the semester. Furthermore, more than half of students self-reported that they could now relate physics topics to their majors and future careers...

Even though there has been a tremendous amount of research done in how to help students learn physics, students are still coming away missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: why bother with physics? Students learn fundamental laws and how to calculate, but come out of a general physics course without a deep understanding of how physics has transformed the world around them. In other words, they get the "how" but not the "why". Studies have shown that students leave introductory physics courses almost universally with decreased expectations and with a more negative attitude. This paper will detail an experiment to address this problem: a course weblog or "blog" which discusses real-world applications of physics and engages students in discussion and thinking outside of class. Specifically, students' attitudes towards the value of physics and its applicability to the real-world were probed using a 26-question Likert scale survey over the course of four semesters in an introductory physics course at a comprehensive Jesuit university. We found that students who did not participate in the blog study generally exhibited a deterioration in attitude towards physics as seen previously. However, students who read, commented, and were involved with the blog maintained their initially positive attitudes towards physics. Student response to the blog was overwhelmingly positive...

In this meta-analysis, we synthesize the results of 24 studies using the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) and the Maryland Physics Expectations Survey (MPEX) to answer several questions: (1) How does physics instruction impact students' beliefs? (2) When do physics majors develop expert-like beliefs? and (3) How do students' beliefs impact their learning of physics? We report that in typical physics classes, students' beliefs deteriorate or at best stay the same. There are a few types of interventions, including an explicit focus on model-building and/or developing expert- like beliefs that lead to significant improvements in beliefs. Further, small courses and those for elementary education and non-science majors also result in improved beliefs. However, because the available data oversamples certain types of classes, it is unclear whether these improvements are actually due to the interventions, or due to the small class size, or student population typical of the kinds of classes in which these interventions are most often used. Physics majors tend to enter their undergraduate education with more expert-like beliefs than non-majors and these beliefs remain relatively stable throughout their undergraduate careers. Thus...

This is a review of Lee Smolin's "The Trouble with Physics". The main gist of the review is that the physics of the past three decades has been rich with new discoveries in a large number of domains. The Standard Model, while providing a successful framework for the electroweak and strong interactions still needs to be developed further to fully account fot the mass of strong interaction data collected over the decades. A multitude of new phenomena have been discovered however, or predicted theoretically, in the physics of very low temperatures (e.g. fractional Hall effect, Bose-Einstein condensation) and quantum macroscopic effects (liquid crystals, high temperature superconductivity), some of which remain to be fully explained. Therefore if there is any "Trouble with Physics", as implied by the author of this book, it mainly concerns speculative work on Superstring theory, which may or may not turn out to agree with the results of observation. The subject as a whole does not appear to be in trouble.; Comment: 5 pages, book review

The solution to the Euler-Lagrange equation is an extremal functional.To understand that the functional is stationary at local extrema (maxima or minima), we propose a physics experiment that involves using soap film to form a catenoid. A catenoid is a surface that is formed between two coaxial circular rings and is classified mathematically as a minimal surface.Using soap film, we create catenoids between two rings and characterize the catenoid in-situ while varying distance between rings. The shape of the soap film is very interesting and can be explained using dynamic mechanics. By observing catenoid, physics students can observe local extrema phenomena. We stress that in-situ observation of soap film catenoids is an appropriate physics experiment that combines theory and experimentation.; Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures; title is modified, final version to appear in European Journal of Physics

Too often, physics students are beset by feelings of failure and isolation rather than experiencing the creative joys of discovery that physics has to offer. This dissertation research was founded on the desire of a teacher to make physics class exciting and motivating to his students. This work explores how various aspects of learning environments interact with student motivation. This work uses qualitative and quantitative methods to explore how students are motivated to engage in physics and how they feel about themselves while engaging in physics. The collection of four studies in this dissertation culminates in a sociocultural perspective on motivation and identity. This perspective uses two extremes of how students experience physics as a lens for understanding motivation: fear and self-preservation versus integrity and self-expression. Rather than viewing motivation as a property of the student, or viewing students as inherently interested or disinterested in physics, the theoretical perspective on motivation and identity helps examine features of the learning environments that determine how students experience themselves through physics class. This perspective highlights the importance of feeling a sense of belonging in the context of physics and the power that teachers have in shaping student motivations through the construction of their classroom learning environments. Findings demonstrate how different ways that students experience themselves in physics class impact their performance and interest in physics. This dissertation concludes with a set of design principles that can foster integration and integrity among students in physics learning environments.; Comment: 186 pages

In this work, we are going to present a literature review of researches that focus on the relationships, difficulties and didactic proposals between Physics and Literature. We have researched on the scientific production of the academic community in specialized journals and congress minutes about Physics teaching, by seeking in abstracts and titles of academic works the following keywords: Science/Physics and Literature, reading and Science/Physics teaching, scientific dissemination/fiction, and use of analogies/metaphors in Science/Physics teaching. The scarcity of published studies led us to research in journals which are not specialized in Physics Education and to extrapolate the research period. We aim to understand how the relationship between Physics and Literature has been discussed by the scientific area, by identifying how the Physics Education can benefit from the resources offered by Literature. In this literature review, we have found a huge educational potential in the use of Literature and its resources as a possible didactic tool for Physics teaching.; http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7941.2015v32n3p577Apresentamos uma revisão bibliográfica sobre pesquisas que focam as relações, dificuldades e propostas didáticas entre física e literatura. Pesquisamos...