Physics education research, electronic materials, and the musings of Christopher Moore, Ph.D.
Apr 22nd, 2011
That is, if you are male. Here is a great study from UC-Davis documenting the significant effect professor gender has on female students’ performance in physics:
Dec 26th, 2010
I will be at the AAPT Winter Meeting in January where I will give a talk about the conceptual physics course we have been developing (more here and here.) The main point of the talk is to look at the data and answer the question posed in the title. The answer to that question is [...]
Dec 20th, 2010
A while back, I discussed a plan for my Conceptual Physics courses for non-science majors. Well, I taught the course. It was 48 students and me, and we successfully moved through a lot of the Physics by Inquiry (PbI) curriculum.
Mar 15th, 2009
I am in Pittsburgh at the American Physical Society (APS) March meeting until Tuesday. Today was a series of workshops and talks on Physics Education Research (PER) as part of the pre-APS meeting for the Physics Teachers Education Coalition (PTEC). First, I arrived last night (Saturday) and spent the evening the same way I always [...]
Next semester I will be attempting something new in our general education, conceptual physics course here at Longwood University. I plan on implementing Lillian McDermott’s Physics by Inquiry (PbI) … with a twist. The suggested enrollment for such a course is 20 students, with 1 instructor and 1-3 teaching assistants. My course next semester will [...]
Jul 2nd, 2008
Carlwin has the following question about energy: I dont know if our solution is right, but here’s the problem: Compute for the energy given off by a gas doing 200 J of work and losing 1350 J of its internal energy to the environment Normally, I don’t respond to these types of questions for two [...]
Jun 30th, 2008
I’m back in Farmville after spending the weekend in College Park, MD being taught how to teach. (Technically, I’m in Richmond working on research right now, but I will be in Farmville tonight.) I didn’t get an opportunity to blog about the workshop much as it was going, because the schedule was very dense and [...]
Mar 3rd, 2008
The San Fransisco Chronicle reports that a Quaker math teacher was fired for refusing to sign an oath of allegiance. This is not necessarily physics news, but having gone to Guilford College and having a background in the Society of Friends, this is an interesting story to me. Marianne Kearney-Brown, a Quaker and graduate student [...]