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Resources-oriented instruction in physics treats student thinking as sensible and then seeks to connect what students are saying and doing to physics content and practices. This paper uses an illustrative case to make progress toward answering the instructional questions: "What does resources-oriented instruction in physics look like?" and "How can I do it?". We analyze an interaction between a university TA and a group of four introductory physics students completing a worksheet about mechanical wave propagation. We show some of the ways in which the TA's instructional moves supported students in making conceptual progress, even though several of the students' ideas would not be accepted as correct by many physicists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps the most commonly cited student idea about forces in the literature is the notion of an impetus force, defined as the "belief that there is a force inside a moving object that keeps it going and causes it to have some speed," that can then "fade away as the object moves along." According to the literature, even after physics instruction students use impetus force reasoning to argue that forces are necessary to sustain motion or that motion implies force. For example, many students drew an upward arrow to indicate a force on a coin that was moving upward after being tossed. The coin was halfway between the point of its release and its turnaround point. Interviews with students in the course indicate that the arrow was meant to indicate "the 'force of the throw,' the 'upward original force,'" and so on. Clement interprets these results to mean that students "believe that continuing motion implies the presence of a continuing force in the same direction, as a necessary cause of the motion." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the student ideas about forces discussed in the literature, perhaps the most commonly reported is the notion of an impetus force, or the "belief that there is a force inside a moving object that keeps it going and causes it to have some speed." For example, Clement asked university students taking introductory mechanics to draw a free-body diagram for a coin that has been tossed upward. He found that students often drew an arrow in the direction of the coin's motion, at a point midway between the initial toss and the turnaround point, sometimes providing reasoning that suggested that the arrow corresponds to a "force from your hand" or the "force of the throw." Clement interpreted these responses as indicating that "student[s] may believe that continuing motion implies the presence of a continuing force in the same direction, as a necessary cause of the motion." As another example, in a study conducted with undergraduate students at Johns Hopkins University, McCloskey, Caramazza, and Green asked students to draw the path a ball will follow after it exits the curved tubes pictured in Fig. 1. The authors found that students often drew curved trajectories for the ball exiting each tube, and they coined the term "curvilinear impetus principle" to describe students' reasoning. They write that students reasoned as though "an object constrained to move in a curved path acquires a curvilinear impetus that causes it to continue in a curved trajectory for some time after the constraints on its motion are removed." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Next Generation Science Standards lay out a model of energy that locates energy within objects and fields, and tracks energy as it transfers between these objects and transforms between forms of energy while always being conserved. This model of energy pervades much of modern science and represents a foundational, cross-cutting concept for students. However, because it is abstract, energy is a very difficult topic for most students to learn. We have developed Energy Cubes to help make energy more concrete for students. Energy Cubes allow groups of learners to represent the dynamic energy changes in real-world scenarios by moving and flipping cubes on a horizontal shared workspace (see Fig. 1.) While Energy Cubes are accessible for elementary students, with carefully chosen scenarios we have found that Energy Cubes promote sophisticated and rigorous reasoning and argumentation among learners at all grade levels. The rules of Energy Cubes are presented in Fig. 2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As I type, it is late September 2021, and emails are streaming into my inbox about my university's return to in-person instruction in just a few weeks. I wish I could say I feel excited or relieved or grateful for all of the incredible care that went into planning for this, but I actually just want to scream. Because no matter what we do, we are still in the midst of a global pandemic with variants that are "covered in ultrafast-drying Gorilla super glue" that "make [them] extremely effective in attaching to human cells and gaining entry," and returning to in-person instruction is not safe. I know this in my gut because I am chronically ill and immunosuppressed, and my survival depends on my careful assessment of risk in this pandemic climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I argue that mainstream physics epistemologies and physics teaching and learning practices reify ableism, augmenting the marginalization of disabled and chronically ill people in physics. I make this claim from my standpoint as a physicist who became disabled and chronically ill when I was 2 years old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) call for K-12 science instruction that centers on and substantively takes up students' science ideas. In this paper, we explore the question, "What role might physics faculties play in preparing teachers in the era of NGSS?," as we also consider our field's adage that "most teachers tend to teach as they were taught." In particular, we propose the importance of teacher education experiences that take teachers' own physics ideas seriously. We argue that physicists can play a critical role in this work by designing and facilitating teacher preparation and professional development that (1) elevates and maintains a focus on teachers' physics ideas and (2) collaboratively subjects teachers' ideas to the kinds of tests to which we subject our own ideas. We ground these considerations in two illustrative episodes from our local context: Focus on Energy professional development for elementary teachers. We highlight particular professional development instructor moves that take teachers' ideas seriously, and we discuss questions and implications that emerge from our analysis. Although the focus of our analysis is on taking teachers' ideas seriously, we suggest that most of our arguments also apply to taking students' ideas seriously in pre-college and university physics courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, my aim is to problematize the invisibility (to instructors) of the purposes of particular exercises within research-based instructional materials (RBIMs) and to provide one possible solution to this problem that other teacher educators may adapt for their institutional contexts. In particular, I show that many RBIMs anticipate and respond to particular (often incorrect) learner ideas, that teachers often do not recognize this, and that not recognizing this can cause teachers to miss opportunities to build on learner ideas and/or engage students in scientific practices. I share an instructional activity I designed that is meant to support teachers—including university physics Learning Assistants—in recognizing the purposes of particular questions or sequences of questions within RBIMs, and I illustrate that this activity can be a productive starting place for conversation about RBIMs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the views of the authors on developing a pedagogical approach for teachers which requires them to empathizing with the scientific ideas of their students.

The article discusses the concept of privilege with particular consideration on the categories of race and gender and their meaning and consequences and the problem with certain values attached to them and how those values foster and generate social hierarchies. It explores the underrepresentation in physics as a sign of deeper systems of unfair advantage in physics, highlighting the importance of developing a shared language and vision around privilege.

We report the common justifications that university physics and chemistry students use to reason about changes in the pressure of an ideal gas from a microscopic perspective, based on our analysis of written responses from more than one thousand students. We find that these justifications vary in the extent to which they are (a) mechanistic and (b) consistent with kinetic-molecular theory. We propose that these ideas could serve as the basis for instruction and curriculum development that attends to student thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article elaborates on Energy Tracking Diagrams (ETDs), like the dynamic representations from which they are derived, express a conceptualization of energy as conserved, localized and flowing among objects, accumulating in objects and changing form. Topics include ETDs contributing to the representation of energy in physical systems, with distinct advantages for tracking energy transfer and transformations. Also mentioned are ETDs providing a new means of assessing energy concepts.

This article reports on a long-term investigation of student and teacher reasoning about the basic tenets of kinetic-molecular theory as they relate to the concept of volume. This research grew out of the finding that university-level students and practicing K-12 teachers often treat the volume of a gas as different from that of its enclosing container. We examined the extent to which this tendency might be associated with incorrect reasoning about the motions of the particles in the gas. The results suggest that teachers and students often justify incorrect answers about the volume of a gas with incorrect statements about the motion of gas particles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]