Can we explain the physics conceptual inventory gender gap?

October 9, 2019 Nick Young

Can we explain the physics conceptual inventory gender gap?

Prior physics preparation seems to be the biggest contributor to the gender gap but a lot is still unknown.

February 13, 2019 Nick Young

Is taking notes on paper better than taking notes on a computer? Y- Maybe?

Prior work has claimed that taking notes by hand is better than on a computer but this claim doesn’t appear to hold up.

January 2, 2019 Nick Young

Buy the pizza, have the grading party

Getting a group of instructors together to grade can be difficult, but it seems to be worth the hassle.

December 5, 2018 Nick Young

The GRE: what is it good for?

The GRE: great at acting as a barrier to underrepresented groups, not so good as a predictor of completing graduate school.

October 24, 2018 Nick Young

How far is far? Investigating students’ knowledge about distance to astronomical objects

Students are often unfamiliar with sizes and distances of astronomical objects. Today’s study compares student knowledge about this topic at different educational levels.

September 12, 2018 Nick Young

Extra! Extra! Physics labs might be extra

Labs have been a standard part of the physics curriculum. Today’s paper suggests that labs don’t help students develop physics knowledge beyond what is already covered in other parts of the course.

August 15, 2018 Nick Young

Paper or Pla– Electronic For Conceptual Inventories

There is only so much class time during a semester which may make it difficult to incorporate research based assessments. Can we just give them online?

August 1, 2018 Nick Young

The lack of a relation between student learning and student evaluations

Student evaluations of instruction are widely used to evaluate instructors. Today’s article suggests these are not correlated with student learning.

June 6, 2018 Nick Young

To use g or not to use g? That is the question.

Normalized gain, g, has been the standard statistic in PER for the past two decades, but its statistical properties haven’t been explored until recently.

May 23, 2018 Nick Young

The Original Case for Active Learning

Arguably one of the most significant papers in physics education, this paper gave strong evidence in favor of active learning over traditional lecture courses.