Maine Center for Research in STEM Education

To date, there has been relatively little work conducted by the physics education research community on upper-division laboratory courses.  Perhaps even more importantly, while there is a large and incredibly rich body of literature on student understanding of introductory electric circuits, there is surprisingly little published work on student understanding of (non-introductory) analog electronics.  This […]

In all upper-division laboratory courses (including those on analog electronics), there are many important learning goals (e.g., the development of experimental design skills and troubleshooting expertise); many of these are neither assessed nor articulated explicitly, and, in general, relatively little is known about the extent to which these goals are being met.  To date, there […]

We often argue that students possess a functional understanding of a given concept if they recognize, on their own, the need to apply that concept in a new situation and then are able to do so successfully.  (In essence, this is equivalent to the notion of transfer.)  At the same time, a collaborative investigation with […]