Related papers: The Dynamics of Students' Behaviors and Reasoning …
People often strive for deep engagement in activities which is usually associated with feelings of flow: a state of full task absorption accompanied by a sense of control and fulfillment. The intrinsic factors driving such engagement and…
Computation is intertwined with essentially all aspects of physics research and is invaluable for physicists' careers. Despite its disciplinary importance, integration of computation into physics education remains a challenge and, moreover,…
This article is on collective phenomena in pedestrian dynamics during the assembling and dispersal phases of gatherings. To date pedestrian dynamics have been primarily studied in the natural and engineering sciences. Pedestrians are…
In this paper, we present a new task that investigates how people interact with and make judgments about towers of blocks. In Experiment~1, participants in the lab solved a series of problems in which they had to re-configure three blocks…
Physics faculty care about their students learning physics content. In addition, they usually hope that their students will learn some deeper lessons about thinking critically and scientifically. They hope that as a result of taking a…
Recent advances in mechanistic interpretability have revealed that large language models (LLMs) develop internal representations corresponding not only to concrete entities but also distinct, human-understandable abstract concepts and…
Studies of scientists building models show that the development of scientific models involves a great deal of subjectivity. However, science as experienced in school settings typically emphasizes an overly objective and rationalistic view.…
Traditional problem-based exams are not efficient instruments for assessing the "structure" of physics students' conceptual knowledge or for providing diagnostically detailed feedback to students and teachers. We present the Free Term Entry…
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…
Understanding how physicists solve problems can guide the development of methods that help students learn and improve at solving complex problems. Leveraging the framework of cognitive task analysis, we conducted semi-structured interviews…
Project Based Learning (PBL), recognized as an active learning strategy, has been linked to self efficacy of student in prior studies, including those within Physics Education Research. Meanwhile, technological advancements have…
Historically, the implementation of research-based assessments (RBAs) has been a driver of education change within physics and helped motivate adoption of interactive engagement pedagogies. Until recently, RBAs were given to students…
With the adoption of instructional laboratories (labs) that require students to make their own decisions, there is a need to better understand students' activities as they make sense of their data and decide how to proceed. In particular,…
This work investigates how tutoring discourse interacts with students' proximal knowledge to explain and predict students' learning outcomes. Our work is conducted in the context of high-dosage human tutoring where 9th-grade students (N=…
Physical learning is an emerging paradigm in science and engineering whereby (meta)materials acquire desired macroscopic behaviors by exposure to examples. So far, it has been applied to static properties such as elastic moduli and…
The aim of this study is to investigate the decisions and reasoning of undergraduate students when choosing simple measurement instruments in an introductory physics laboratory course. For this study, we have developed a questionnaire and…
Small group activities have been widely adopted in college level science courses. As students participate in these activities, it is important to consider how group members collectively regulate their activity and complete group task.…
Framing affects how students interpret, approach, and accomplish tasks. Little is known, however, about how students frame tasks in physics labs. During the first lab of a sequence designed to teach students about modeling and critical…
The scope of this paper was to find out how the students in Computer Science perceive different teaching styles and how the teaching style impacts the learning desire and interest in the course. To find out, we designed and implemented an…
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…