Formal readings and lectures are effective at delivering explanations, but the information they impart can be so densely packed and de-contextualized that students may not make full sense of the content. Arena and Schwartz found that video games have the potential to unlock the expository content delivered by lectures, textbooks, and diagrams.
Cannady, Greenwald, and Harris call into question the accuracy of the STEM pipeline metaphor. They argue that a decade of pipeline-related policy prescriptions has not significantly affected the numbers or demographics of the STEM workforce. The authors found that almost half of STEM workers did not follow the traditional pipeline to a STEM career.
This paper describes the potential benefits of incorporating art into physics education. Drawing and sculpture provide a way of understanding abstract concepts. The process may also allow educators to “humanize” physics and thus make it more accessible to historically marginalized groups.
One challenge in scaling up effective educational programs is how to adjust implementation to local contexts. One solution that the authors Penuel, Fishman, Cheng, and Sabelli propose is “design-based implementation research,” (DBIR) in which researchers and practitioners collaboratively identify problems and strategies during implementation while learning from this process to support innovations in new contexts.