Physics Commons^™

Development Of An Innovative Observational Astronomy Class For High School Students In Collaboration With The University Of Texas/Rio Grande Valley, Alan W. Hendrick

Theses and Dissertations

The vision presented by the National Academy of Science Standards is for all students to spend more time ‘doing’ science in order to develop science literacy and be better prepared not only for college but also in understanding and participation in global current events. A course in observational Astronomy is just that, an opportunity for student to “do ‘science by collaborating with actual scientists in real research. The course follows a path in which students learn foundational knowledge and apply this knowledge to complete a successful celestial observation, interpreting the results by making inferences and predictions. This paper begins with …

Examining Student Reasoning In Introductory Physics: Reversing The Chain, William S. Johnson

Honors College

While physics education researchers have investigated student conceptual understanding of specific topics in physics for over thirty years, much less is known about the ability of students to construct qualitative inferential reasoning chains. Such reasoning chains are ubiquitous in scaffolded, research-based instructional materials. As part of a multi-institutional effort to develop instruments to probe student reasoning skills, this thesis describes an investigation into whether the direction of a question can influence the ability of the students to construct correct reasoning chains. Reasoning reversal tasks were administered to introductory calculus-based physics students at the University of Maine. Students were randomly presented …

The Interactions Of Relationships, Interest, And Self-Efficacy In Undergraduate Physics, Remy Dou

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This collected papers dissertation explores students’ academic interactions in an active learning, introductory physics settings as they relate to the development of physics self-efficacy and interest. The motivation for this work extends from the national call to increase participation of students in the pursuit of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers. Self-efficacy and interest are factors that play prominent roles in popular, evidence-based, career theories, including the Social cognitive career theory (SCCT) and the identity framework. Understanding how these constructs develop in light of the most pervasive characteristic of the active learning introductory physics classroom (i.e., peer-to-peer interactions) has …

I Love My Baffling, Backward, Counterintuitive, Overly Complicated Magnitudes, Christopher Sirola

Faculty Publications

All professions have their jargon. But astronomy goes the extra parsec. Here’s an example. Vega, one of the brighter stars in the night sky, has an apparent magnitude (i.e., an apparent brightness) of approximately zero. Polaris, the North Star, has an apparent magnitude of about +2. Despite this, Vega appears brighter than Polaris, and not by two, but by a factor of about six times.

The Mainstream Scientific Community Is Open To Incremental But Not Holistic Ideas, Maurice Goodman

Articles

NeuroQuantology

doi: 10.14704/nq.2017.15.2.1041

Pilot Investigation Into The Use Of An Anthropomorphic Breast Sonography Phantom As A Training And Assessment Tool, Jacinta Browne, Louise Cannon, Ronan Mcdermott, Max Ryan, Andrew J. Fagan

Articles

A device for the training and quantitative assessment of the competency of trainee radiologists in the technically challenging area of breast sonography was developed and evaluated. Currently, suitable commercially available devices are lacking, and there is a growing realization that the reliance on direct exposure to patients for learning may not represent best practice from either the trainees' or patients' perspective. Three devices (PI, PII and PIII) were designed to produce very realistic sonographic images of breast morphology with a range of embedded pathologies. The pilot evaluation used a case study research design to evaluate the role of the anthropomorphic …