Physics Education Research at Montana State University

Research Projects

People

Prospective Students

Department of Physics

Education Research

The Physics Education Research (PER) group at Montana State is committed to better understanding how students learn physics and astronomy.  Our research targets both STEM majors as well as non-STEM majors, because we believe that all students should have some working knowledge of science.  We are currently involved in several different projects, including:

• an NSF funded project geared toward increasing the spatial reasoning skills of middle school students. National Science Foundation DRL: Designing a Middle Grades Spatial Skills Curriculum (abstract available here).
• developing heliophysics related curricular materials for NASA. Resources are available here.
• increasing the oral communication skills of STEM graduate students. National Science Foundation NRT-IGE: Fostering Effective Oral Communication Skills for STEM Graduate Students (abstract available here).
• Improving student beliefs regarding the learning of science.

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