Related papers: Using conceptual metaphor and functional grammar t…
Previous research has found that introductory physics students perform far better on numeric problems than on otherwise equivalent symbolic problems. This paper describes a framework to explain these differences developed by analyzing…
Students often begin physics courses with misconceptions rooted in everyday experience and intuition, which can be resistant to change. While research has identified strategies for addressing misconceptions across physics, it remains…
Covariational reasoning -- how one thinks about the way changes in one quantity affect another quantity -- is essential to calculus and physics instruction alike. As physics is often centered on understanding and predicting changes in…
Physics Education Research (PER) applies a scientific approach to the question, "How do our students think about and learn physics?" PER allows us to explore such intellectually engaging questions as, "What does it mean to understand…
We discuss several ways of illustrating fundamental concepts in statistical and thermal physics by considering various models and algorithms. We emphasize the importance of replacing students' incomplete mental images by models that are…
Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…
Most educational literature on conceptual change concerns the process by which introductory students acquire scientific knowledge. However, with modern developments in science and technology, the social significance of learning successive…
Group work is becoming increasingly common in introductory physics classrooms. Understanding how students engage in these group learning environments is important for designing and facilitating productive learning opportunities for…
Machine learning algorithms learn a desired input-output relation from examples in order to interpret new inputs. This is important for tasks such as image and speech recognition or strategy optimisation, with growing applications in the IT…
Symbolic calculators like Mathematica are becoming more commonplace among upper level physics students. The presence of such a powerful calculator can couple strongly to the type of mathematical reasoning students employ. It does not merely…
We provide a systematic approach to quantum mechanics from an information-theoretic perspective using the language of tensor networks. Our formulation needs only a single kind of object, so-called positive *-tensors. Physical models…
On the surface, behavioural science and physics seem to be two disparate fields of research. However, a closer examination of problems solved by them reveals that they are uniquely related to one another. Exemplified by the theories of…
Written language is a complex communication signal capable of conveying information encoded in the form of ordered sequences of words. Beyond the local order ruled by grammar, semantic and thematic structures affect long-range patterns in…
The mindset literature is a longstanding area of psychological research focused on beliefs about intelligence, response to challenge, and goals for learning (Dweck, 2000). However, the mindset literature's applicability to the context of…
Metaphors are everywhere. They appear extensively across all domains of natural language, from the most sophisticated poetry to seemingly dry academic prose. A significant body of research in the cognitive science of language argues for the…
Most categorical models of meaning use a functor from the syntactic category to the semantic category. When semantic information is available, the problem of grammar induction can therefore be defined as finding preimages of the semantic…
We discuss the clusters of resources that emerge when upper-division students write about electromagnetic fields in linear materials. The data analyzed for this paper comes from students' written tests in an upper-division electricity and…
Analyzing students' written solutions to physics questions is a major area in PER. However, gauging student understanding in college courses is bottlenecked by large class sizes, which limits assessments to a multiple-choice (MC) format for…
Electromagnetic theory is central to physics. An undergraduate major in physics typically takes a semester or a year of electromagnetic theory as a junior or senior, and a graduate student in physics typically takes an additional semester…
The study of semantic relationships has revealed a close connection between these relationships and the morphological characteristics of a language. Morphology, as a subfield of linguistics, investigates the internal structure and formation…