Related papers: Student Behavior and Epistemological Framing: Exam…
One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between the fundamental principles of classical physics and their personal experience. Nonetheless, numerous studies have shown…
One of the major difficulties in learning physics is for students to develop a conceptual understanding of the core concepts of physics. Many authors have argued that student conceptions of basic physical phenomena are rooted in basic…
As educators we often ask our physics students to work in groups---on tutorials, during in-class discussions, and on homework, projects, or exams. Researchers have documented the benefits of group work for students' conceptual mastery and…
Many physics instructors aim to support student sensemaking in their classrooms. However, this can be challenging since instances of sensemaking tend to be short-lived, with students often defaulting to approaches based on answer-making or…
We demonstrate how students' use of modeling can be examined and assessed using student notebooks collected from an upper-division electronics lab course. The use of models is a ubiquitous practice in undergraduate physics education, but…
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 ability to emotionally or intellectually understand another person's thoughts and feelings-empathy-can foster critical connections that facilitate learning and collaboration. We present a case study of physics faculty that examines…
Assessment tasks provide opportunities for students to make sense of novel contexts in light of their existing ideas. Consequently, investigations in physics education research have extensively developed and analyzed assessments that…
In introductory physics laboratory instruction, students often expect to confirm or demonstrate textbook physics concepts (Wilcox & Lewandowski, 2017; Hu & Zwickl, 2017; Hu & Zwickl, 2018). This expectation is largely undesirable: labs that…
This work examines student meaning-making in undergraduate physics problem-solving. We use a social semiotic perspective to sketch a theoretical framework. The social semiotic approach focuses on all types of meaning-making practices that…
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…
Systematic observations of student gestures can not only fill in gaps in students' verbal expressions, but can also offer valuable information about student ideas, including their source, their novelty to the speaker, and their construction…
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…
One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between formal physical principles and personal experience. However, research has shown that awareness of connections between…
Through in-class observations of teaching assistants (TAs) and students in the lab sections of a large introductory physics course, we study which TA behaviors can be used to predict student engagement and, in turn, how this engagement…
Analyzing student behavior in educational scenarios is crucial for enhancing teaching quality and student engagement. Existing AI-based models often rely on classroom video footage to identify and analyze student behavior. While these…
Learning and reasoning about physical phenomena is still a challenge in robotics development, and computational sciences play a capital role in the search for accurate methods able to provide explanations for past events and rigorous…
Covariational reasoning--considering how changes in one quantity affect another, related quantity--is a foundation of quantitative modeling in physics. Understanding quantitative models is a learning objective of introductory physics…
Language can exert a strong influence on human behaviour. In experimental studies, it is for example well-known that the framing of an experiment or priming at the beginning of an experiment can alter participants' behaviour. However, few…
Physics education researchers have argued that authentic physics education includes computation as part of a physics student's training, and many parties have made efforts towards this goal. However, most research on this teaching modality…