Each year the National Science Foundation (NFS) grants funding for universities in the United States to provide a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) summer program. The Department of Physics and Astronomy at Brigham Young University (BYU) has been a recipient of NSF REU grants for several years. This year the administrators of the REU program at BYU requested an evaluation be conducted to determine if their program was effective at helping participants have a significant research experience, as well as determine the impact the program is having on student's attitudes towards the field of physics, graduate school, and research. This report contains the findings of the evaluation and recommendations for program improvement.

The purpose of this research is to use Schoenfeld¡¦s mathematics problem-solving model to analyze processes, strategies, and affective characteristics of children in a gifted primary program, and then, to propose concrete suggestions for gifted class and general class teachers. Participants were six third-grade gifted children who were great in articulation, and enrolled in one primary school in Kaohsiung. The investigator analyzed think-aloud protocols of them who solved four non-routine problems selected by several expert teachers. The findings of this study were three. First, all six gifted students' thought processes mostly conformed to Schoenfeld¡¦s problem-solving model, though with various differences by individuals, and by problems. One of them provided two correct answers, having no verification stage in all problems. And one only provided one correct answer, had less analysis, exploration, design, and verification stage in solving all problems. Second, children exhibited diversified and flexible strategies. They used representing, drawing figures, working backward, introducing auxiliary element, and attempting mistakes to solve four non-routine mathematical problems. Last, the affective characteristics of students were positive. They were patient and perseverant and showed personal mathematics curiosity, excitement, and confidence, which were given as creative characteristics by Sternberg, and as mathematical talent or characteristics by Krutetskii. The investigator concluded that not all gifted students possessed meta-cognition ability: including exploration, design, and verification. The gifted class teachers could use non-routine mathematics problems to discipline students' meta-cognitive ability, including exploration, design, and verification, and encourage them to generate more solving strategies by group discussion in class. Finally, the general class teachers could adopt problem-solving characteristics of gifted students as materials for gifted students and general students to learn together in class.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between some of selected affective characteristics of high school students related to physics lesson and their physics achievement in electricity concept. These affective characteristics of the students includes their interest in physics, importance of physics, enjoyment of extra-curricular activities related to physics, physics course anxiety, physics test anxiety, achievement motivation in physics, student motivation in physics, self-efficacy in physics and self-concept in physics. Two causal models explaining the direction of the relationship between these affective characteristics and physics achievement was hypothesized and tested. A questionnaire consisted of 10 sub-dimensions was used in order to determine the affective characteristics of high school students. The achievement scores were obtained by using Ninth Grade Electricity Test developed by the researcher. The Ninth Grade Electricity Test includes 29 items about the electricity concept. The Ninth Grade Electricity Test and the Affective Characteristics Scale were administered to 1457 students in 22 foreign language high schools in Ankara when they start to tenth grade in 2004-2005 academic year. The researcher was the data collector and was present in the class during administration of scale and test. The preliminary analyses were conducted by using Excel and SPSS 10.0 and the confirmatory analysis and testing of the hypothesized structural models were conducted by LISREL 8.30 for Windows. The findings indicated that achievement in physics has a significant effect on high school students&rsquo / affective characteristics. Since, affective characteristics of students are effective on achievement in later years, they should be firmly formed at high school years. Besides, affective characteristics should be improved whether they have an effect on achievement or not, because they have an effect on persistence in from of selection of courses which also may give the chance of being successful in a subject to a student.