The Proceedings of the 12th PTEE conference 2024 in Rosenheim present 15 articles from a wide range of actual topics in physics teaching – from artificial intelligence, innovative teaching and examination methods, lab experiments, tutorials to thoughts on what would be desirable to know, when you start teaching (activating) physics.
Research on the teaching and learning of physics has identified specific conceptual and reasoning difficulties that often prevent students from developing a functional understanding of various topics taught in introductory physics courses. There is evidence that instructional materials that take into account such difficulties and prompt students to critically assess their own understanding can improve student learning. In this paper Tutorials in Introductory Physics are introduced, a set of materials intended to supplement the lecture, textbook, and laboratory of standard introductory physics courses for students in physics, engineering, and other fields. The Tutorials in Introductory Physics were originally developed by Lillian McDermott and the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington. They have been translated into other languages, including Spanish, Greek and German. In addition, they have served (and continue to serve) as a model for the development of instructional materials for other STEM subjects, such as electric circuits and engineering mechanics. We discuss various aspects of incorporating the Tutorials into a typical course and possible issues associated with their implementation.
In this work we investigate students’ thinking about and difficulties with incompressible, steady pipe flow. There is substantial evidence that students have difficulty applying and prioritizing the two basic principles of mass conservation (i.e., the continuity equation) and energy conservation (i.e., Bernoulli’s equation). When distracted by questions which involve gravity students based their answers on ill-supported assumptions about local pressures. The predominant arguments use a simplified Bernoulli equation, descriptive arguments or analogies to single-particle motion. Based on these results, an instructional intervention is developed that seems to address the observed difficulties.
We report on an investigation of student thinking about steady-state pipe flow of an incompressible fluid. About 250 undergraduate engineering students were given a test consisting of two hydrodynamics questions, combining multiple-choice format with subsequent open-ended explanations. There is substantial evidence that students have difficulty applying and prioritizing the two basic principles of mass conservation (expressed in the continuity equation) and energy conservation (i.e., Bernoulli’s equation). When faced with questions that involve gravity, dissipative effects (“friction”), or a visible pressure drop, a considerable number of students did not invoke the continuity equation in situations where applying it is a necessary step for arriving at the correct answer. Instead, even after lecture instruction on this topic, many of the first-year students based their answers on ill-supported assumptions about local pressures. Some of them used formal arguments from a simplified Bernoulli equation (“lower pressure means higher velocity”), while others based their answer on intuitive arguments (“higher pressure leads to higher velocity”). We also found reasoning based on analogies to single-particle motion (“flow velocity decreases when flowing upwards or friction is present”). Contrary to other researchers, we did not see any evidence for the hypothesis that students think of water as a compressible fluid. Instead, students’ answers often indicate a lack of understanding of the conservation of mass or its implications for incompressible fluids or of the role that this principle plays in the context of fluid flow. In addition, our data indicate that some students have more general difficulties in describing and reasoning about technical situations, such as applying equations containing multiple variables, distinguishing spatial differences in a quantity from its changes with respect to time, or realizing the meaning of idealizations. We also present some evidence that different levels of activation of students during instruction influence the prevalence of these difficulties and discuss some implications for instruction.