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The modern era of cosmology began nearly one hundred years ago. From the start, the field has engendered controversy, both within and beyond the halls of science. At its root stands Einstein's elegant theory of gravitation, general relativity. Einstein's contemporaries saw in his equations a universe that could evolve over time -- a possibility that Einstein himself initially rejected. Other physicists worried that an evolving universe might sound too much like the biblical account, and urged caution.

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New insights into student understanding continue to emerge from ongoing investigations by the Physics Education Group at the University of Washington. Two projects that focus on electric circuits and dynamics are part of a larger effort to develop and refine research-based instructional materials for several different student populations. The results have strong implications for instruction in introductory and upper-level physics courses and laboratories as well as in special physics courses for preservice and inservice K-12 teachers.

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Superfluidity - the ability of liquid 4He, when cooled below 2.176 K, to flow without resistance through narrow pores - is one of the most amazing phenomena in physics. Supersolidity - the coexistence of superfluid behavior with the crystalline order of a solid - was proposed theoretically long ago as an even more exotic phase of solid 4He, but it has eluded detection until recently. In 2004, Kim and Chan (E. Kim and M. H. W. Chan, Nature (London) 427, 225 (2004); E. Kim and M. H. W.

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Broadly, my research focuses on how students interpret the nature of activity in school science settings and how that impacts what they learn. In this presentation I will describe characterizations of two ways students can interpret their activity in science classes, I label them answermaking and sensemaking. Answermaking is common and unproductive for the goal of students coming to see the concepts of physics for what they are, ways of making sense of physical phenomena. Sensemaking is a potentially productive student view of school activity for this goal.

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Physics Colloquium Monday 26 February 2007 4:00 pm Weniger 153 Refreshments 3:30 Weniger 305 Towards improving physics education: examples of student mathematical and conceptual difficulties in quantum mechanics Dr. Homeyra Sadaghiani Department of Physics University of Washington Over the past twenty-five years, Physics Education Research (PER) has changed our view of student learning in the traditional introductory courses.

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CANCELLED.In this
talk I examine the impact of bringing instructional methods and models
developed in the U.S. to an Introductory Physics course at a Brazilian
university. Using participant observation, interviews, and
questionnaires, we investigated the influence of cultural context on
the effectiveness of teaching. I describe student responses to
instructional approaches that were designed to change their

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Many colleges and universities promote writing across the curriculum, both for developing writing skills and for gaining content knowledge. Writing is one of many higher-order goals that can be a focus of the introductory curriculum. But do we know if it is effective, or how to use it to promote learning? Historically writing in the disciplines is assumed beneficial, but most published papers fail to show a link between writing and improved conceptual understanding within a discipline.

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In this talk, I will discuss the two main areas of my research in physics education, helping students become better problem solvers and investigating students' attitudes towards physics and the learning of physics. Problem Solving: One of the goals of many physics courses is to help students learn to use physics principles to solve novel problems. However, as anyone who has taught a physics course knows, this is a difficult task.

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