People - Faculty - John R. Thompson
John R. Thompson
Associate Professor of Physics and
Cooperating Associate Professor of Education
- 1990 B.S. in Physics (cum laude), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
- 1992 Sc.M. in Physics, Brown University
- 1998 Ph.D. in Physics, Brown University
Office: 223 Bennett Hall
Phone #: (207)581-1030
EMail Link: John_Thompson@umit.maine.edu
For most recent vitae, click here
Research Interests:
Research:
Physics Education Research – research on the learning and teaching of physics – including research-based curriculum development. Co-manage research group of 15-20 members, including undergraduates, master’s and doctoral students, and faculty. ]
Current active research topics:
- Student understanding of thermal physics at advanced undergraduate levels in physics, especially:
- entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
- student models for entropy, in the context of ideal gas processes
- student application of the Second Law to heat engines and thermodynamic cyclic processes
- comparisons of student entropy models across disciplines (chemistry, chemical engineering, and physics)
- The relationship between conceptual understanding in physics and knowledge of the associated and underlying mathematics
- integration in the context of process variables and state functions
- partial differentiation in the contexts of material properties and the Maxwell relations
- probability in the context of statistical distributions
- Understanding of teaching and learning in physics by graduate students and teachers, and the interplay between specialized content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge (knowledge of the teaching and learning of a topic).
- Student understanding of vectors and vector operations.
- Student understanding of two-dimensional kinematics, including the context dependence of that understanding and the interpretations of different representations. Development and assessment of curriculum that emphasizes conceptual understanding and transfer to different contexts.
- Conceptual understanding of sound at both the introductory level and among preservice and inservice K-12 teachers. Development of curriculum on sound aimed at elementary teachers, and on longitudinal waves aimed at introductory physics students
Other topics of interest
- Student understanding of magnetic fields and representations thereof,
and in particular of the magnetic structure of flexible refrigerator magnets
- Student understanding of concepts in 9th- and 12th-grade physics courses:
investigating the Physics First movement
