Different approaches to helping students develop conceptual understanding in university physics

A symposium organized by the GTG PERU-Physics education Research at University In this article we present a summary of initiatives that have been undertaken by a subset of the European Physics Education community to try to help students develop conceptual understanding. The contributions to this article represent a broad spectrum of ideas and research strategies that range from innovative teaching methods, to empirical applied psychology studies. Future physics professionals: scientists, teachers, engineers, analysts etc. are a diverse set of people and therefore the methods used to help them improve their understanding should be wide ranging. However, common themes emerge that we suggest as teaching implications namely: that more attention should be paid to how we develop students’ ability to reason; how building self-confidence can be hugely beneficial to closing knowledge gaps and how the split-attention effect acts to limit students’ working memory.