United States

The conceptual development of student understanding of weight
Xiangqun Zhang and Lei Bao
Existing research has reported persistent difficulties among students at all levels in understanding the concepts involving weight and gravitation. In the literature and textbooks, there are two versions of weight definition in terms of (1) the gravitational force applied on an object and (2) the force applied on the supporting object. The latter is often referred to as the operational definition of weight, which describes the process of weighing an object. Studies have also demonstrated that using the operational definition in teaching can improve student understanding of the concepts involving weight, gravitation, and weighing. However, in the Chinese middle school physics curriculum, the gravitational definition of weight is mandated and universally implemented in instruction. To investigate the impact on student learning from using the gravitational definition of weight, a post-instruction survey is conducted to examine students’ conceptual understandings of weight. The results will be discussed and compared to the literature.


AAPT SM21

The conceptual development of student understanding of weight

the conceptual development

Join AAPT and Physics Educators worldwide in developing and strengthening your professional connections by attending the 2021 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting. AAPT meetings are a great way to reflect on your teaching, recommit to best practices and re-energize your career with new research, products, and techniques.

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2021 CAP Virtual Congress

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How can you successfully deliver community STEM outreach when face-to-face opportunities are limited? And how can you best support the most vulnerable and underrepresented members of your community through virtual STEM education?

During this talk, you will hear of our experiences in adapting our existing outreach programmes and crafting new virtual programmes to suit the evolving educational needs of young people in Leicester, as well as our recommendations for effectively utilising virtual STEM engagement for years to come.

STEM Through the Screen: Experiences of adapting community outreach

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This talk provides an introduction to the mission, features, and types of articles in the American Journal of Physics with a goal of helping potential authors understand how to prepare a submission.

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Surface charges direct the flow of current through conductors. In anthropomorphic terms, they tell the current where to go and where not to go. As acknowledged by Professors Griffiths, Jackson, and Chabay and Sherwood, surface charges have been difficult to calculate. This paper presents a new way to calculate surface charges in which the surface of the conductor is covered with pixels which hold the surface charge. The pixels (referred to as "sensing pixels") sense the electric fields produced by all the other charges in the system and adjust their internal charge until steady state is reached. Importantly, sensing pixels allow students (and researchers) to understand why surface charge distributions, however calculated, look the way they do by asking the simple question: "What would a sensing pixel sense?" As Professor Sherwood kindly wrote to the author, this can make such counterintuitive phenomena as the accumulation of charges at edges, intuitive.

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Looking back, it has been a year like no other for The Physics Teacher. I will shine a spotlight on some of our recent content such as the exciting collection of articles on sex, gender and physics teaching, while also reflecting on some of the metrics we use to measure what we produce. In addition I will attempt to convey some glimpses of possible future feature items in TPT.

TPT Highlights from a Challenging Year

In our presentation, we discuss gender inequality in the physics classroom. Diversity strengthens science, but in most physics classrooms female students are disadvantaged both directly and indirectly: extensive research shows that they are undermined, viewed as less capable, and have less successful experiences both in terms of learning and identity formation. In this article and presentation, written in partnership between a male high school physics teacher and a female student from his 2018-2019 12th-grade physics class, we describe a two-week period in which we worked together to try to change the culture of our physics class.

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The biological cell exhibits a fantastic range of behaviors, but ultimately these are governed by a handful of physical and chemical principles. Here we explore simple theory, known for decades and based on the simple thermodynamics of mixtures of ideal gases, which illuminates several key functions performed within the cell. Our focus is the free-energy-driven import and export of molecules, such as nutrients and other vital compounds, via transporter proteins. Complementary to a thermodynamic picture is a description of transporters via "mass-action" chemical kinetics, which lends further insights into biological machinery and free energy use. Both thermodynamic and kinetic descriptions can shed light on the fundamental non-equilibrium aspects of transport. Our biochemical-physics discussion will remain agnostic to chemical details.

The conceptual development of student understanding of weight

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