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Almost everyone today has flown in an airplane. Many ask the simple question "what makes an airplane fly?" The answer one frequently gets is misleading and often just plain wrong. As an example, most descriptions of the physics of lift fixate on the shape of the wing (i.e. airfoil) as the key factor in understanding lift. The wings in these descriptions have a bulge on the top so that the air must travel farther over the top than under the wing. Yet we all know that wings fly quite well upside down where the shape of the wing is inverted. To cover for this paradox we sometimes see a description for inverted flight that is different than for normal flight. In reality the shape of the wing has little to do with how lift is generated and everything to do with efficiency in cruise and stall characteristics. Any description that relies on the shape of the wing is wrong.

Choosing a system of interest and identifying the interactions of the system with its environment are crucial steps in applying the relation between work and energy. Responses to problems that we administered in introductory calculus-based physics courses show that many students fail to recognize the implications of a particular choice of system. In some cases, students do not believe that particular groupings of objects can even be considered to be a system. Some errors are more prevalent in situations involving gravitational potential energy than elastic potential energy. The difficulties are manifested in both qualitative and quantitative reasoning.

All of us - teachers, parents, and students - retain outdated ideas about learning that are based largely on our previous experiences in school. Modern brain science has helped steer us in the right direction. Here are a few of the biggest myths:

The PER User's Guide is a web resource for physics educators to learn how to teach more effectively by applying the results of physics education research (PER) and teaching methods based on these results. Research in the field of PER has made enormous advances in understanding how students learn physics most effectively and in developing teaching methods that apply this understanding to achieve improved student learning. The goal of this site is to provide a synthesis of decades of physics education research in a format that is easy for busy physics instructors to understand and apply.