Related papers: Applying a resources framework to analysis of the …
Studies indicate that pre-existing misconceptions negatively impact the effectiveness of traditional physics education. Research has also shown that activity based instruction improves posttest scores on conceptual evaluations. However, the…
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…
Contextuality has been identified as a potential resource responsible for the quantum advantage in several tasks. It is then necessary to develop a resource-theoretic framework for contextuality, both in its standard and generalized forms.…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
The area of constrained clustering has been extensively explored by researchers and used by practitioners. Constrained clustering formulations exist for popular algorithms such as k-means, mixture models, and spectral clustering but have…
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…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by educators and physics education researchers. Many of the items on the FCI have strong distractor choices…
Teachers often conduct surveys in order to collect data from a predefined group of students to gain insights into topics of interest. When analyzing surveys with open-ended textual responses, it is extremely time-consuming, labor-intensive,…
We investigate student understanding of energy and momentum concepts at the level of introductory physics by designing and administering a 25-item multiple choice test and conducting individual interviews. We find that most students have…
The unsupervised text clustering is one of the major tasks in natural language processing (NLP) and remains a difficult and complex problem. Conventional \mbox{methods} generally treat this task using separated steps, including text…
Group fairness definitions such as Demographic Parity and Equal Opportunity make assumptions about the underlying decision-problem that restrict them to classification problems. Prior work has translated these definitions to other machine…
Conceptual tests are widely used by physics instructors to assess students' conceptual understanding and compare teaching methods. It is common to look at students' changes in their answers between a pre-test and a post-test to quantify a…
We address the problem of federated learning (FL) where users are distributed and partitioned into clusters. This setup captures settings where different groups of users have their own objectives (learning tasks) but by aggregating their…
Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments…
The imminent need to interpret the output of a Machine Learning model with counterfactual (CF) explanations - via small perturbations to the input - has been notable in the research community. Although the variety of CF examples is…
Research-based assessment instruments (RBAIs) are ubiquitous throughout both physics instruction and physics education research. The vast majority of analyses involving student responses to RBAI questions have focused on whether or not a…
How far can we take the resource theoretic approach to explore physics? Resource theories like LOCC, reference frames and quantum thermodynamics have proven a powerful tool to study how agents who are subject to certain constraints can act…
We investigate student understanding of energy and momentum concepts at the level of introductory physics by designing and administering a 25-item multiple choice test and conducting individual interviews. We find that most students have…
Session-based Recommendation (SR) systems have recently achieved considerable success, yet their complex, "black box" nature often obscures why certain recommendations are made. Existing explanation methods struggle to pinpoint truly…
Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) begins from a context, given as a binary relation between some objects and some attributes, and derives a lattice of concepts, where each concept is given as a set of objects and a set of attributes, such that…