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Despite the large body of research showing that students in STEM classes at all levels learn better via active learning than they do via lecture, post-secondary physics and astronomy (P&A) faculty members continue to primarily use…
Students must learn effective problem solving strategies in order to develop expertise in physics. Effective problem solving strategies include a conceptual analysis of the problem followed by planning of the solution, and then…
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…
The perspectives of introductory classical physics students can often negatively influence how those students later interpret quantum phenomena when taking an introductory course in modern physics. A detailed exploration of student…
Computation is becoming an increasingly important part of physics education. However, there are currently few theories of learning that can be used to help explain and predict the unique challenges and affordances associated with…
The ability to accurately predict the surrounding environment is a foundational principle of intelligence in biological and artificial agents. In recent years, a variety of approaches have been proposed for learning to predict the physical…
One area of physics education research has focused on the nature of ontologies (mental categorizations of concepts, substances and processes), and how they might be used to gain insight into student thinking when learning classical physics.…
Computation is a central aspect of 21st century physics practice; it is used to model complicated systems, to simulate impossible experiments, and to analyze mountains of data. Physics departments and their faculty are increasingly…
In a recent report, the American Association of Physics Teachers has developed an updated set of recommendations for curriculum of undergraduate physics labs.1 This document focuses on six major themes: constructing knowledge, modeling,…
This work examines how experiences in one disciplinary domain (biology) can impact the relationship a student builds with another domain (physics). We present a model for disciplinary relationships using the constructs of identity, affect,…
Physics-based reinforcement learning tasks can benefit from simplified physics simulators as they potentially allow near-optimal policies to be learned in simulation. However, such simulators require the latent factors (e.g. mass, friction…
Two main procedures characterize the way in which social actors evaluate the qualities of the options in decision-making processes: they either seek to evaluate their intrinsic qualities (individual learners), or they rely on the opinion of…
STEM education researchers are often interested in identifying moments of students' mechanistic reasoning for deeper analysis, but have limited capacity to search through many team conversation transcripts to find segments with a high…
In this study, we explored the extent to which problems and instructional strategies affect social cohesion and interactions for information seeking in physics classrooms. Three sections of a mechanics physics course taught at a Chilean…
Curiosity is a vital metacognitive skill in educational contexts, leading to creativity, and a love of learning. And while many school systems increasingly undercut curiosity by teaching to the test, teachers are increasingly interested in…
In order for robots and other artificial agents to efficiently learn to perform useful tasks defined by an end user, they must understand not only the goals of those tasks, but also the structure and dynamics of that user's environment.…
Learning physics is a context dependent process. I consider a broader interdisciplinary problem of where differences in understanding and reasoning arise. I suggest the long run effects a multiple choice based learning system as well as…
The spring-mass system studied in undergraduate physics laboratories may exhibit complex dynamics due to the simultaneous action of gravitational and elastic forces in addition to air friction. In the first part of this paper, we describe a…
Pre-college mathematics modeling instruction often frames mathematics as being separated from reasoning about the real world -- and commonly treats reasoning mathematically and reasoning about the real-world context as separate stages of a…
Physicists and physics students have been studied with respect to the variation in ways they expound on their topic of research and a physics problem, respectively. A phenomenographic approach has been employed; six fourth-year physics…