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Physics and Astronomy


People - Faculty - John R. ThompsonJohn 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

Web Links:

PERL Web site

The Center Web site


Back to Faculty

 

Department of Physics
120 Bennett Hall
Orono, Maine 04469-5709
Phone: (207) 581-1039 | Fax: (207) 581-3410
Chairperson: Dr. David Batuski


The University of Maine
, Orono, Maine 04469
207-581-1110
A Member of the University of Maine System