Physical Review Physics Education Research

By evaluating textbook force diagrams using Cognitive Load Theory, researchers found that overlapping information and inconsistencies may actively hinder student understanding.

A negative priming study reveals that changing a physics problem’s visual context dramatically alters the cognitive effort students need to suppress misconceptions, an effect that is buffered by advanced physics training.

Moving beyond final answers, this study reveals that the physical presentation of physics solutions — specifically spacing, straight lines, and legibility — meaningfully correlates with higher overall grades.

Overcoming the Position–Velocity Indiscrimination (PVI) misconception in position–time graphs requires inhibitory control to suppress misleading position cues and redirect attention toward relevant slope cues.

While some physics educators advocate for early introduction of mathematical formalism, this study suggests that fostering affective factors like student interest is the key to unlocking functional reasoning in quantum physics.

More practice with limiting-case analysis helps physics students build both the confidence and skill to make sense of mathematical expressions.

Students in a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience reported that collaboration, relevance, and engaging in authentic science as key outcomes.

A survey of STEM faculty reveals that the adoption of generative AI is driven not by institutional initiatives, but by an instructor’s “AI pedagogical orientation”—their underlying beliefs about how AI impacts disciplinary thinking and learning.

Moving beyond formal coursework, entry into the quantum workforce relies heavily on experiential learning, translating prior skills to new contexts, and building professional networks.

A new hybrid learning environment pairs a digital simulator with sensor-equipped physical gears, giving introductory physics students a distinct advantage in grasping complex multi-gear transmission ratios.

High school students’ willingness to use generative AI for physics learning depends not only on how easy and useful they find the technology, but heavily relies on their subject-specific confidence, values, and perceived costs regarding physics itself.

A new study evaluating nearly 1,000 handwritten physics exam solutions reveals that while out-of-the-box text embeddings can cluster similar responses, they rely too heavily on surface features to be used for automated grading.

When students leave physics exam problems blank, assigning a grade of zero may unintentionally exacerbate equity gaps; this retrospective study shows that uncompleted test item rates vary significantly by students’ race/ethnicity and first-generation status.

Through think-aloud interviews, this study explores how students learn quantum computing, identifying three key cognitive resources they activate and occasionally misapply when reasoning about the CNOT gate.

Using in-depth, task-based think-aloud interviews and 3D materials, researchers uncover the specific, often hidden alternative mental models high school students use to explain the Sun’s apparent motion.