The discipline-based education research (DBER) report from the National Research Council (2012) highlighted the existence of a research-practice gap in science instruction in higher education and the need to identify strategies to close it. This study hypothesizes that one potential factor is instructors' access to research-based…

Two experiments explored the role of vicarious "self" explanations in facilitating student learning gains during computer-presented instruction. In Exp. 1, college students with low or high knowledge on Newton's laws were tested in four conditions: (a) monologue (M), (b) questions (Q), (c) explanation (E), and (d) question + explanation (Q + E).…

It has been suggested that Einstein's principle of equivalence (PE) should be introduced at an early stage. This principle leads to the notion of local effective gravity, which in turn defines effective vertical and horizontal directions. Local effective gravity need not coincide with the direction of terrestrial gravity. This paper describes…

This article describes three connected projects in physics: (1) a very successful course at the university level; (2) a collection of several thousand multimedia materials, its status and evaluation, and its dissemination; and (3) Web experiments--experiments that can be operated remotely from a distance via the Internet. (Contains 4 tables and 10…

A computer-assisted instruction (CAI) physics lesson on magnetism was supplemented with slides and film loops to provide a simulated encounter with simple magnetism experiments. Two groups of students took the CAI lesson, but one group viewed the simulated experiments, while the other group performed the actual laboratory experiments. Since…