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The experimental observation of gravitational waves in recent years has generated much excitement. In this instance, the interplay between theory and experiment is intriguing. The groundbreaking Eotvos experiment was undertaken around 1900, followed by Einstein’s prediction. Experimental observations occurred a century later. The question arises, ‘Can such experimental experiences be recreated in university and school laboratory programs’? Various phrases have been coined for such learning experiences, authentic, inquiry, to the practice of physics. Furthermore, the learning experiences are given different names, experiments, practicals and investigations; and in the current, context can be referred to as inquiry-based learning, project-based learning to STEM projects. In whatever form, curricula and pedagogies internationally are aspiring to instil the wonder of science through such pedagogies. But how can we tell if they are effective? And even more fundamentally, what does ‘effective’ mean? It is important to note that there are genuine challenges, from defining effective to, how to measure or evaluate. This paper seeks to provide insights by sharing two decades of research on experimentation in the Australian context. The strength of the work is that it straddles schools and universities, intertwining science disciplines, identifying commonalities and threads, binding the sciences together.

Physics is a discipline associated with diverse emotions; some enjoy it, others don’t. Yet, students’ emotions when studying physics are under researched. This study adapts the Achievement Emotions Questionnaire (AEQ) to measure the emotions of students with first year physics undergraduate practicals. The aims of this research are to validate the AEQ in our context and to probe students’ emotions towards two practicals; the control which is of standard format and the intervention which incorporates colour and historical aspects seeking to produce more positive emotions. Confirmatory Factor Analysis and descriptive statistics conducted with a sample of 320 students confirm the reliability and internal validity of the adapted AEQ (AEQ-PhysicsPrac) for the purposes of this study. Differences in emotions between the control and intervention are detected indicating that the AEQ-PhysicsPrac has utility in physics education.

Typically, the format of online physics educational videos is closer in style to direct instruction rather than being interactive. One simple way of making videos more interactive is asking questions in one video, providing solutions in the second and seeking student reflection. This study utilises two physics education videos by Derek Muller (Veritasium) which were deployed with 508 first year physics students at The University of Sydney. The students watched the first video, which asked four physics questions, and were prompted to write down their answers. After this, the students were shown the solutions video and asked whether they changed, or did not change their answer, and their reasons for doing so. Data were analysed with a mixed-methods approach. While students whose answers did not match the solutions mostly modified their answers, a nontrivial percentage did not. An interesting finding is that the reasons provided for modifying or not modifying their answers are similar, or ‘mirrors’ of each other. We comment on the nature of the questions and the opportunities for learning by incorporating reflective thinking, particularly through videos that use a question, solution & reflection style.

Interactivity, group learning and student engagement are accepted as key features of social constructivist learning theories. The challenge is to understand the interplay between such features in different learning environments. This study focused on the qualitative differences between two interventions—small-groups and whole-class discussions. In both interventions, three short video slices on the abstract topic ‘the physics of superconductivity’ were interspersed with the different discussion styles. The video slices are based on the Bruner stages. Twenty-nine first year university physics students completed a pre-test, underwent the intervention and completed a post-test. The remainder of the data were collected from student drawings, video recordings, observer notes and facilitator feedback. Results indicate that the use of the video slices in both interventions were successful in changing students’ understandings of superconductivity. However, the small groups treatment tended to facilitate questioning, meaning-making and subsequent changes of ideas more so than the whole class discussions. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

To succeed within scientific disciplines, using representations, including those based on words, graphs, equations, and diagrams, is important. Research indicates that the use of discipline specific representations (sometimes referred to as expert generated representations), as well as multi-representational use, is critical for problem solving and developing understanding. This paper consolidates these ideas using the Representational Fluency Survey (RFS) over two years with 334 students at The University of Sydney. Analysis shows that there was a significant difference between the representational fluency of the 1st year Fundamental and Regular students (low level 1st year physics courses) compared to the 1st year Advanced, 2nd year, 3rd year and Postgraduate level students. The existence of this distinct gap is further supported by evidence from qualitative coding that students with a high level of representational fluency use a greater number of representations and more visual and symbolic representations to explain their answers. There is no mention of such an overall trend of variation of representational use in extant literature, largely because there have been no studies that compare representational fluency across closely spaced levels of physics, or science, learning.

In recent decades, the literature paid attention to students' conceptions of the nature of disciplines. This study aimed to investigate how students' cohesive and fragment conceptions of physics changed with a major change in senior high school physics syllabus. We obtained measures of conceptions of physics by utilizing a 20-item questionnaire and triangulated by open-ended responses. The sample was 1979 first year university students from three different years surveyed in their first laboratory session. The first cohort of 780 first year university students had experienced the old syllabus in high school and the next two cohorts of 511 and 688 first year university students had experienced a rejuvenated high school syllabus. By establishing the reliability and validity we found that there exists a substantial shift in student conceptions of the cohesiveness of physics coinciding with the school syllabus change. This shift was mirrored in qualitative data. Furthermore, students with more previous engagement in physics learning, on the average, demonstrated less fragmented and more cohesive conceptions with the rejuvenated syllabus than with the old syllabus. © 2013 by ESER, Eurasian Society of Educational Research.

We recently developed a multiple-choice conceptual survey in mechanical waves. The development, evaluation, and demonstration of the use of the survey were reported elsewhere [A. Tongchai et al., Developing, evaluating and demonstrating the use of a conceptual survey in mechanical waves, Int. J. Sci. Educ. 31, 2437 (2009)ISEDEB0950-069310.1080/09500690802389605]. We administered the survey to 902 students from seven different groups ranging from high school to second year university. As an outcome of that analysis we were able to identify several conceptual models which the students seemed to be using when answering the questions in the survey. In this paper we attempt to investigate the strength with which the students were committed to these conceptual models, as evidenced by the consistency with which they answered the questions. For this purpose we focus on the patterns of student responses to questions in one particular subtopic, wave propagation. This study has three main purposes: (1) to investigate the consistency of student conceptions, (2) to explore the relative usefulness of different analysis techniques, and (3) to determine what extra information a study of consistency can give about student understanding of basic concepts. We used two techniques: first, categorizing and counting, which is widely used in the science education community, and second, model analysis, recently introduced into physics education research. The manner in which categorizing and counting is used is very diverse while model analysis has been employed only in prescriptive ways. Research studies have reported that students often use their conceptual models inconsistently when solving a series of questions that test the same idea. Our results support their conclusions. Moreover, our findings suggest that students who have had more experiences in physics learning seem to use the scientifically accepted models more consistently. Further, the two analysis techniques have different advantages and disadvantages. Our findings show that model analysis can be used in more diverse ways, provides flexibility in analyzing multiple-choice questions, and provides more information about consistency and inconsistency of student conceptions. An unexpected finding is that studying waves in other contexts (for example, quantum mechanics or electromagnetism) leads to more consistent answers about mechanical waves. The suggestion is that studying more abstract topics may solidify students’ understanding of more concrete waves. While this might be considered to be intuitive, we have not actually found direct empirical studies supporting this conjecture.

The widely held constructivist view of learning advocates student engagement via interactivity. Within the physics education research community, several specific interactive strategies have been developed to enhance conceptual understanding. One such strategy, the Interactive Lecture Demonstration (ILD) is designed for large lecture classes and, if measured using specific conceptual surveys, is purported to provide learning gains of up to 80%. This paper reports on learning gains for two different Projects over ten years. In Project 1, the ILDs were implemented from 1999 to 2001 with students who had successfully completed senior high school physics. The learning gains for students not exposed to the ILDs were in the range 13% to 16% while those for students exposed to the ILDs was 31% to 50%. In Project 2, the ILDs were implemented from 2007 to 2009 with students who had not studied senior high school physics. Since the use of ILDs in Project 1 had produced positive results, ethical considerations dictated that all students be exposed to ILDs. The learning gains were from 28% to 42%. On the one hand it is pleasing to note that there is an increase in learning gains, yet on the other, we note that the gains are nowhere near the claimed 80%. This paper also reports on teacher experiences of using the ILDs, in Project 2.

With student numbers decreasing and traditional teaching methods having been found inefficient, it is widely accepted that alternative teaching methods need to be explored in tertiary physics education. In 2006 a different teaching environment was offered to 244 first year students with little or no prior formal instruction in physics. Students were invited to attend additional enrichment classes 1 h a week called map meetings. The focus of these classes was a different type of visual presentation of physics material called link maps. Link maps explicitly show the key concepts covered in lectures and how these interrelate to help novices establish their physics schemata. In each map meeting the link map for the different topic was interactively discussed by the researcher before the students worked on problems in groups using the link map. The class ended with the researcher going through one problem, talking aloud about how to logically attack it. The results were promising. Each week about 20% of the class voluntarily attended map meetings whereas 22% reported that they did not attend due to timetable clashes. Two questionnaires revealed that students thought the classes were helpful for gaining an overview of physics and for developing their problem solving abilities. In the final examination the 32 students who had attended at least eight out of ten map meetings achieved, on average, 9 points out of 90 better in the examination $(p=0.004)$ than a comparison group $(N=40)$ with similar academic background which had not attended map meetings. The results of this study suggest that map meetings are a valuable learning environment for physics novices. Further investigations are currently being undertaken.

The Sydney University Physics Education Research group (SUPER) has an active program offering (a) PhDs by research for students and (b) research projects for visiting scholars. So why do we need to undertake such projects within a physics school rather than in education schools and faculties? The prime reason is that adequate domain knowledge and skills are required to work in areas such as conceptual change, subject‐specific cognitive theories, expert/novice modeling, and multiple representations. In addition, a decrease in student motivation for studying physics has captured the interest of research‐based university departments who are now interested in reversing the trend. The areas under investigation by the SUPER group include student understandings of gravity, collaborative learning environments for large first‐year classes, and the transfer of mathematics skills and knowledge.

In this paper we describe phenomenography and demonstrate its use in two separate studies; an investigation of students’ understandings of gravity and a comparison of two groups of students awareness of the utility of physics.