Participation in undergraduate research experiences (UREs) has been identified as an important way of increasing undergraduate retention, interest, and identity within the sciences. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) have been shown to have similar outcomes to UREs but can reach a larger number of students at one time and are…

Physics education research to date has predominantly focused on the undergraduate level. This has left critical avenues of research in graduate education relatively understudied and has motivated much of my research. Numerous studies across the education research landscape have analyzed undergraduate admissions practices, but few have critically…

This article reports on a study that examined papers written by graduate students in the Physical Seminary course at Johns Hopkins University (1892-1913) to investigate how students reused various visuals of the interferometer to construct narratives of late-19th-century Ether research. Their representations of the interferometer focused on the…

Preprint articles are available on servers, such as arXiv and ChemRxiv, at no-cost to benefit the movement toward open access of research. However, the use of preprint research articles as a reference source in academia is not heavily documented. To examine if researchers are utilizing preprint articles, this paper examines citation trends in the…

Studying the factors that influence the quality of physics Ph.D. students'doctoral experiences, especially those that motivate them to stay or leave their programs, is critical for providing them with more holistic and equitable support. Prior literature on doctoral attrition has found that students with clear research interests who establish an…

We analyze how participating in undergraduate research experiences (UREs) influenced physics students' trajectories of participation within the community of practice of physics researchers. Students in the study participated in an elective seminar in which they were paired with graduate student and faculty mentors on physics research projects and…

While the positive outcomes of undergraduate research experiences (UREs) have been extensively categorized, the mechanisms for those outcomes are less understood. Through lightly structured focus group interviews, we have extracted the cognitive tasks that students identify as engaging in during their UREs. We also use their many comparative…

The Institute for Research in Schools (IRIS) was set up to give science students the opportunity to work on cutting-edge research projects. Teachers and students can access data and equipment that enable them to tackle real-life issues. As a result, not only do students gain in confidence and experience in their scientific work, they are also able…

Engaging freshman and sophomore students in meaningful scientific research is challenging because of their developing skill set and their necessary time commitments to regular classwork. A project called the Chondrule Analysis Project was initiated to engage first- and second-year students in an initial research experience and also accomplish…

The purpose of this dissertation study was to explore the experiences of high school physics students who were solving complex, ill-structured problems, in an effort to better understand how self-regulatory behavior mediated the project experience. Consistent with Voss, Green, Post, and Penner's (1983) conception of an ill-structured problem in…

The advanced interdisciplinary research laboratory (AIRLab) represents a novel, effective, and motivational course designed from the interdisciplinary research interests of chemistry, physics, biology, and education development faculty members as an alternative to the independent thesis project experience. Student teams are assembled to work…

The United States Association for Young Physicists Tournaments (USAYPT) held its annual February Tournaments on Feb. 9-10, 2007, at the North Carolina School for Science and Mathematics, Durham, NC. Young physicists' tournaments are theoretical and experimental research-based team competitions described more fully at the USAYPT website:…

There are many schools (grades K-12) around the country that offer some sort of science research option for students to pursue. Often this option is a local science fair, where students do smaller projects that are then presented at poster sessions. Many times the top local projects can advance to some type of regional and, possibly, state science…

Reports one student's reaction to an innovative course that presents concepts with a minimal amount of math, removes much scientific jargon, provides a historical perspective, and allows optional student involvement in research. (GS)

Describes a research program in which high school students act as individual investigators on scientific projects. Probes how to better introduce current scientific research topics and methodologies into the classroom. Provides an example using fractals. (MVL)