Encouraging students to understand the 1D wave equation

Despite its crucial importance in physics, there are not many studies focusing on student difficulties and teaching strategies related to the (1D) wave equation in the PER literature. In order to contribute to fill this gap, we conducted a study with university students which focused on specific aspects that are crucial for understanding this equation. Our results include not only key learning difficulties and potential teaching strategies to circumvent them, but they also suggest that students can search for a deeper understanding of physics equations when prompted to do so.

• Received 17 March 2023
• Accepted 5 October 2023

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.19.020161

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society

Muhammad Aswin Rangkuti1,2,* and Ricardo Karam1

• 1Department of Science Education, University of Copenhagen, Universitetparken 5, Copenhagen 2100, Denmark
• 2Department of Physics, Universitas Negeri Medan, Jl Willem Iskandar Psr V, Medan 20211, Indonesia

• *[email protected]