Short answers, pulled from the story.
Physics education research is a subfield of educational research that studies how physics is taught and how students learn it. Its aim is to identify weaknesses in current teaching methods and develop approaches that more effectively help students understand physics concepts.
Aristotle's explanations of motion and physical phenomena align closely with everyday intuition, making them resilient even after formal Newtonian instruction. Researchers have found that students taught exclusively Newtonian concepts still tend to revert to Aristotelian reasoning when working through unfamiliar problems.
Aristotle's ideas about motion were not displaced until the end of the 17th century, when Newton published his own framework. For centuries before that, including through the Late Middle Ages, Aristotle's physics was taught largely unchanged.
The Socratic method, also called the recitation method, is a student-centric approach in which the teacher asks questions designed to prompt students' own thinking rather than deliver answers directly. Its effectiveness depends heavily on the quality of the questions asked, and it works best when students already have partial familiarity with the material.
In problem-based learning, groups of 8-10 students and a tutor work through a trigger problem together, with one student serving as chair and another as scribe. The group identifies learning objectives, studies independently, then reconvenes to share findings. The approach was developed in UK medical schools and has been shown effective in physics teaching as well.
Mechanics, specifically the concept of force, has generated the most research on students' ideas, with 792 publications listed in Duit's 2005 bibliography. Electricity came second with 444 publications, followed by optics with 234.