The aim of the study is to determine pre-service and high school physics teachers' ideas about simple electric circuits. In this study, a test contains eight questions related to simple electric circuits was used to the pre-service physics teachers (32 subjects) graduated from Balıkesir University, Necatibey Faculty of Education, the department of physics education and working as physics teachers (25 subjects) in various High Schools in Turkey to determine their ideas about in the same subjects. As a result, it is found that, in partial, while the physics teachers have alternate conceptions about "sequential reasoning", "source of stationary current", and "current usage", the pre-service of physics teachers have unscientific ideas about "source of stationary current", "The concept of current, energy and potential differences are used one another by mistaken", "current usage" and "sequential reasoning".
The main aim of this study was to determine students' perceptions toward web-based versus paper-based homework and identify any differences based on homework performance score and grade point average. A 21-item perception of online vs. paperbased homework survey was administered to 103 students (54 were male and 49 were female) in general physics-1 classes. Results of the study indicated that there was not a statistically significant difference in physics grade point average scores; however, there was a statistically significant difference in homework performance (average) scores based on assigned homework groups. Overall, students' perception of web-based homework testing was positive. Finally, some tentative recommendations are posed.
The main aim of this study was to determine the teaching practices of prospective high school physics teachers with respect to their preference for teaching as a traditionalist or as a constructivist. To study the beliefs of prospective high school physics teachers on this subject, firstly, the Teacher Belief Survey was administered to 135 prospective high school physics teachers; and then semi-structured interviews were conducted with eleven prospective high school physics teachers. Analyzing of the survey and interviews showed that most prospective high school teachers had intermediate (traditionalist to constructivist) beliefs about teaching physics.
Previous research on problem diagrams suggested that including a supportive diagram, one that does not provide necessary problem solving information, may bring little, or even negative, benefit to students' problem solving success. We tested the usefulness of problem diagrams on 12 different physics problems (6A/B experiments) in our massive open online course. By analyzing over 8000 student responses in total, we found that including a problem diagram that contains no significant additional information only slightly improves the first attempt correct rate for the few most spatially complex problems, and has little impact on either the final correct percentage or the time spent on solving the problem. On the other hand, in half of the cases, removing the diagram significantly increased the fraction of students' drawing their own diagrams during problem solving. The increase in drawing behavior is largely independent of students' physics abilities. In summary, our results suggest that for many physics problems, the benefit of a diagram is exceedingly small and may not justify the effort of creating one.
-The purpose of this study is determining university students' conceptual understanding about the subjects of light and optics. This study has been carried out by a total of 252 university students from four different universities (namely, Balıkesir University, Ataturk University, Dicle University and Sütçü İmam University) all over the Turkey. In order to determine students' conceptual understanding and their difficulties on the subjects of light and optics, The Light and Optics Concept Evaluation Test, which includes the subjects of image formation, reflection, refraction convex and concave lenses, polarization, single-slit diffraction and the double slit interference, has been used. When analyzing the data that obtain from all of the subjects, it's been seen that university students have a lot of problems all concepts related to the subjects of light and optics and also found that their level of conceptual understanding were too low. It's been considered that the students' misconceptions could have really big effects about their conceptual understanding and their difficulties about the related topics.
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