Physics

Project Accelerate is a partnership program between Boston University (BU) and the nation’s high schools combining the supportive infrastructures from the students’ traditional school with a highly interactive private edX online instructional tool to bring a College Board accredited AP Physics 1 course to schools not offering this opportunity. During the 2015-16 academic year, Boston University piloted this model with four Boston Public School (BPS) high schools and three small suburban high schools. During the first year of the pilot, students enrolled in Project Accelerate outperformed their peer groups enrolled in traditional AP Physics 1 classrooms.

The purpose of our quasi‐experimental study was to examine the effectiveness of Quality Talk Science, a professional development model and intervention, in fostering changes in teachers’ and students’ discourse practices as well as their conceptual understanding and scientific argumentation. Findings revealed treatment teachers’ and students’ discourse practices better reflected critical‐analytic thinking and argumentation at posttest relative to comparison classrooms.

This article examines recognition by presenting the case of a physics teacher, Dr. D, and his student, Kristina, to address the question: What are the ways in which a young woman perceives recognition from her teacher?

This article examines recognition by presenting the case of a physics teacher, Dr. D, and his student, Kristina, to address the question: What are the ways in which a young woman perceives recognition from her teacher?

We observe teachers in professional development courses about energy constructing mechanistic accounts of energy transformations. We analyze a case in which teachers investigating adiabatic compression develop a model of the transformation of kinetic energy to thermal energy. Among their ideas is the idea that thermal energy is generated as a byproduct of individual particle collisions, which is represented in science education research literature as an obstacle to learning. We demonstrate that in this instructional context, the idea that individual particle collisions generate thermal energy is not an obstacle to learning, but instead is productive: it initiates intellectual progress. Specifically, this idea initiates the reconciliation of the teachers’ energy model with mechanistic reasoning about adiabatic compression, and leads to a canonically correct model of the transformation of kinetic energy into thermal energy. We claim that the idea’s productivity is influenced by features of our particular instructional context, including the instructional goals of the course, the culture of collaborative sense making, and the use of certain representations of energy.