Related papers: Applying a resources framework to analysis of the …
Investigating student learning and understanding of conceptual physics is a primary research area within Physics Education Research (PER). Multiple quantitative methods have been employed to analyze commonly used mechanics conceptual…
Ishimoto, Davenport, and Wittmann have previously reported analyses of data from student responses to the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE), in which they used item response curves (IRCs) to make claims about American and…
The cyclic format of the undergraduate physics curriculum depends on students' ability to recall and utilize material covered in prior courses in order to reliably build on that knowledge in later courses. However, there is evidence to…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is a well-established physics education assessment tool used to evaluate students' comprehension of elementary mechanics principles. While it can be used to analyse the effectiveness of instruction if…
The Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey (EMCS) is a multiple-choice survey that contains conceptual problems involving a variety of energy and momentum concepts covered in a typical introductory physics course for science and engineering…
In this paper, I discuss my personal journey through one research tradition, that of the resources framework, and how it has evolved over time. In my present work, understanding learners' reasoning in physics in terms of the construction of…
The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to…
Learning about underlying patterns in data using latent unobserved structures to improve the accuracy of predictive models has become an active avenue of deep learning research. Most approaches cluster the original features to capture…
Physics education researchers have developed many evidence-based instructional strategies to enhance physics students' conceptual learning. These strategies have historically been tested using assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory…
Newton's third law is one of the most important concepts learned early in introductory mechanics courses; however, ample studies have documented a wide range of students' misconceptions and fragmented understandings of this concept that are…
The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a multiple-choice survey that contains a variety of electricity and magnetism concepts from Coulomb's law to Faraday's law at the level of introductory physics used to help inform…
The current work aims to better understand student course experiences for those who reported negative perceptions in introductory physics. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 students who reported negative perceptions of their…
The Maryland Physics Expectations Survey (MPEX) describes student attitudes and expectations toward learning, and might be used to predict normalized gains on tests such as the Force and Motion Concept Evaluation (FMCE). These predictions…
We are interested in better understanding ways that students collaborate to solve conceptual physics problems in the context of spherical unit vectors in upper-level E&M, especially problems that have been shown to be difficult for students…
Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is a mathematical framework for knowledge representation and discovery. It performs a hierarchical clustering over a set of objects described by attributes, resulting in conceptual structures in which objects…
The resources framework emphasizes the potential productivity of student intuitions for constructing a canonical understanding of physics. It models learning as the progressive coordination and refinement of these resources. Yet, there is a…
An important, yet largely unstudied, problem in student data analysis is to detect misconceptions from students' responses to open-response questions. Misconception detection enables instructors to deliver more targeted feedback on the…
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…
The theme of the World Conference on Physics Education 2012 is "Context, Culture, and Representations." In this talk I present a brief outline of a theoretical framework that allows us to discuss these issues using a model based in…
Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students' knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks (the "ConMap" tasks) was developed to probe the…