0000000000329208
AUTHOR
Gorazd Planinsic
Strategies for Active Learning to Improve Student Learning and Attitudes Towards Physics
Over the last several years, active learning methods and strategies have received considerable attention from the educational community and are commonly presented in the related literature as a credible solution to the reported lack of efficacy of more “traditional” educative approaches. Research has shown that a possible factor is the strongly contextualized nature of active learning that focuses on the interdependence of situation and cognition. In this paper, we report the results of a Symposium with different contributions in the field of research on active learning. We start with a system analysis of the mental processes involved in learning physics which explains how active learning i…
Themes of nanoscience for the introductory physics course
We present three experimental themes and one discussion theme that proved to be suitable for introducing nanoscience through topics that can be integrated into the existing introductory physics or teacher training courses. The experimental themes include two teaching models of an atomic force microscope (AFM) and an experiment with an elastic optical grating. They are all based on simple experiments that give also quantitative results and can be explained using basic physics theory.