Seminar Thursday April 2 by Dr John R Thompson

Dr John R. Thompson of the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Maine, USA who is a Fulbright Scholar at DIT this academic year will give a departmental seminar on "Investigations of student understanding of thermal physics beyond the first year" on Thursday April 2 at 1.10pm in KE1 002.

All are welcome.


"I will describe facets of an ongoing research project on the teaching and learning of upper-level (3rd-4th year) thermal and statistical physics; topics under investigation are often taught in both physics and chemistry modules. The major concept being explored in our work is entropy, both in the thermodynamic and statistical contexts. We find that while student understanding of entropy is improved during a module, difficulties with specific properties of entropy persist, especially with the state function property. Our research also deals with student functional understanding of mathematical concepts applied in these contexts (e.g., integrals, partial differentiation, probability distributions). Comparison of student performance on analogous physics and maths questions suggests a distinction between conceptual physics difficulties and difficulties with application of the underlying mathematics. "

Cold fusion, this time for real?

Twenty years to the day that two electrochemists ignited controversy by announcing signs of cold fusion at an infamous press conference in Utah, a separate team has made a similar claim in the same US state. But this time, the evidence is being taken more seriously.

See newscientist.

Congratulations to Dr Laura Walsh

Congratulations to Dr Laura Walsh of the Physics Education Research Group in the School who successfully defended her doctoral thesis, entitled “A Phenomenographic Study of Introductory Physics Students: Approaches to Problem Solving and Conceptualisation of Knowledge”.

The examiners were Prof. Cedric Linder from Uppsala University, and Prof. Vincent Toal, DIT. Laura was supervised by Dr Brian Bowe and Dr Robert Howard.