According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, a clock runs more slowly if it is close to a large gravitating object. This principle was highlighted in the movie "Interstellar," in which the main character spends several hours on a planet orbiting a massive black hole, and returns to find that his young daughter has become an…

A low-cost, time-resolved spectroscopy experiment appropriate for third year physical chemistry students is presented. Students excite o-methyl red in basic solutions with a laser pointer and use a modular spectrometer with a CCD array detector to monitor the transient spectra as the higher-energy cis conformer of the molecule converts back to the…

Physics lab instruction is evolving in response to changing technology, a desire to better prepare students for diverse careers, and renewed focus from physics education researchers. To prepare researchers to evaluate progress in instructional labs in the future, this study set out to understand the current state of instructional physics labs in…

In response to national calls to better align physics laboratory courses with the way physicists engage in research, we have developed an epistemology and expectations survey to assess how students perceive the nature of physics experiments in the contexts of laboratory courses and the professional research laboratory. The Colorado Learning…

To improve the student learning outcomes of an introductory Human Anatomy and Physiology course we have implemented many changes over the last two years. In this study, the third of a three-part series, we present data from surveys collected and analyzed during the spring semester of 2018 at the University of Northern Colorado. The results reveal…

Recognition without identification (RWI) is a common day-to-day experience (as when recognizing a face or a tune as familiar without being able to identify the person or the song). It is also a well-established laboratory-based empirical phenomenon: When identification of recognition test items is prevented, participants can discriminate between…

Well-designed "controls" distinguish experimental from non-experimental studies. Surprisingly, we found that a high percentage of students had difficulty identifying control experiments even after completing three university-level laboratory courses. To address this issue, we designed and ran a revised cell biology lab course in which…

Two experiments explored the benefits to retention and transfer conferred by mental practice. During familiarization, participants typed 4-digit numbers and took an immediate typing test on both old and new numbers. Participants then typed old 4-digit numbers, either physically or mentally, with either a different response configuration or the…

This paper examines the effects of substituting a computer simulation for real laboratory equipment in the second semester of a large-scale introductory physics course. The direct current circuit laboratory was modified to compare the effects of using computer simulations with the effects of using real light bulbs, meters, and wires. Two groups of…