I’ve explored teacher learning and knowledge in middle school since about 2010. I love working with teachers, and interacting with them has not only changed my career but has made me a better physicist and scientist. Learning to think about energy, force, or motion in terms of middle school students has made me re-think things […]
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One of the most fundamental things about watching people learn (and helping them in the classroom) is that people have fragmented understanding of the world around them. Researchers have modeled this in terms of a Knowledge-in-Pieces (KiP) model, simply accepting the way things are as a basis for building models of knowledge and learning. I […]
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What’s fascinating when a mathematician and a physicist talk about the math that is used in physics is that we often use a set of words that mean something different to each person in the conversation. A physicist sees nothing wrong with putting the x-value on the y-axis of a graph, when x is measuring […]
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RiSE Faculty member Michael Wittmann published a new paper in December, 2020 with co-author Jeffrey Morgan as part of a focused collection on how research theory can be used to support curriculum design. The paper explores the authors’ approaches while using research to inform design of a quantum physics course for non-science majors. In particular, […]
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