16,852 research outputs found
Students' Understanding of Direct Current Resistive Electrical Circuits
Research has shown that both high school and university students' reasoning
patterns regarding direct current resistive electric circuits often differ from
the currently accepted explanations. At present, there are no standard
diagnostic examinations in electric circuits. Two versions of a diagnostic
instrument called Determining and Interpreting Resistive Electric circuits
Concepts Tests (DIRECT) were developed, each consisting of 29 questions. The
information provided by the exam provides classroom instructors a means with
which to evaluate the progress and conceptual difficulties of their students
and their instructional methods. It can be used to evaluate curricular packages
and/or other supplemental materials for their effectiveness in overcoming
students' conceptual difficulties. The analyses indicate that students,
especially females, tend to hold multiple misconceptions, even after
instruction. During interviews, the idea that the battery is a constant source
of current was used most often in answering the questions. Students tended to
focus on current in solving the problems and to confuse terms, often assigning
the properties of current to voltage and/or resistance. Results indicated that
students do not have a clear understanding of the underlying mechanisms of
electric circuit phenomena. On the other hand, students were able to translate
easily from a "realistic" representation of a circuit to the corresponding
schematic diagram.Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in the American
Journal of Physics - Physics Education Research Supplement. No known
publication date as ye
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Teaching Memory Circuit Elements via Experiment-Based Learning
The class of memory circuit elements which comprises memristive,
memcapacitive, and meminductive systems, is gaining considerable attention in a
broad range of disciplines. This is due to the enormous flexibility these
elements provide in solving diverse problems in analog/neuromorphic and
digital/quantum computation; the possibility to use them in an integrated
computing-memory paradigm, massively-parallel solution of different
optimization problems, learning, neural networks, etc. The time is therefore
ripe to introduce these elements to the next generation of physicists and
engineers with appropriate teaching tools that can be easily implemented in
undergraduate teaching laboratories. In this paper, we suggest the use of
easy-to-build emulators to provide a hands-on experience for the students to
learn the fundamental properties and realize several applications of these
memelements. We provide explicit examples of problems that could be tackled
with these emulators that range in difficulty from the demonstration of the
basic properties of memristive, memcapacitive, and meminductive systems to
logic/computation and cross-bar memory. The emulators can be built from
off-the-shelf components, with a total cost of a few tens of dollars, thus
providing a relatively inexpensive platform for the implementation of these
exercises in the classroom. We anticipate that this experiment-based learning
can be easily adopted and expanded by the instructors with many more case
studies.Comment: IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine (in press
San Luis Obispo Children\u27s Museum: The Circuit Lab
Executive Summary
Over a nine month period, the senior project team worked closely with the San Luis Obispo Children’s Museum to develop a new interactive exhibit for the museum’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) floor. The initial budget given for this project was 388.62 overall
Augmented Reality Technology in Teaching about Physics: A systematic review of opportunities and challenges
The use of augmented reality (AR) allows for the integration of digital
information onto our perception of the physical world. In this article, we
present a comprehensive review of previously published literature on the
implementation of augmented reality in physics education, at the school and the
university level. Our review includes an analysis of 96 papers from the Scopus
and Eric databases, all of which were published between January 1st, 2012 and
January 1st, 2023. We evaluated how AR has been used for facilitating learning
about physics. Potential AR-based learning activities for different physics
topics have been summarized and opportunities, as well as challenges associated
with AR-based learning of physics have been reported. It has been shown that AR
technologies may facilitate physics learning by: providing complementary
visualizations, optimizing cognitive load, allowing for haptic learning,
reducing task completion time and promoting collaborative inquiry. The
potential disadvantages of using AR in physics teaching are mainly related to
the shortcomings of software and hardware technologies (e.g., camera freeze,
visualization delay) and extraneous cognitive load (e.g., paying more attention
to secondary details than to constructing target knowledge)
Research-oriented training for Italian teachers involved in the European MOSEM Project
A study on the specific knots of electromagnetic induction and superconductivity for in-service teachers has been carried out within the PCK theoretical framework (Shulman L. S., Educ. Res., 15 (1986) 4). The main knots listed in the literature were the object of an analysis in terms of teachers’ pedagogic behaviour in planning intervention work to overcome the learning problems and organizing class
activities
Integrated Testlets and the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique
The increased use of multiple-choice (MC) questions in introductory-level
physics final exams is largely hindered by reservations about its ability to
test the broad cognitive domain that is routinely accessed with typical
constructed-response (CR) questions. Thus, there is a need to explore ways in
which MC questions can be utilized pedagogically more like CR questions while
maintaining their attendant procedural advantages. we describe how an
answer-until-correct MC response format allows for the construction of
multiple-choice examinations designed to operate much as a hybrid between
standard MC and CR testing. With this tool - the immediate feedback assessment
technique (IF-AT) - students gain complete knowledge of the correct answer for
each question during the examination, and can use such information for solving
subsequent test items. This feature allows for the creation of a new type of
context-dependent item sets; the "integrated testlet". In an integrated testlet
certain items are purposefully inter-dependent and are thus presented in a
particular order. Such integrated testlets represent a proxy of typical CR
questions, but with a straightforward and uniform marking scheme that also
allows for granting partial credit for proximal knowledge. We present a case
study of an IF-AT-scored midterm and final examination for an introductory
physics course, and discuss specific testlets with varying degrees of
integration. In total, the items are found to allow for excellent
discrimination, with a mean item-total correlation measure for the combined 45
items of the two examinations of (mean standard
deviation) and a final examination test reliability of (
items). Furthermore, partial credit is shown to be allocated in a
discriminating and valid manner in these examinations.Comment: 13 pages. 7 figures. Accepted to the American Journal of Physics
(August 2013
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