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Explication and reflection on expert vs. novice considerations within the problem-solving process characterize a cognitive apprenticeship approach for the development of expert-like problem solving practices. In the context of grading, a…
A critical failure mode of current lifelong agents is not lack of knowledge, but the inability to decide how to reason. When an agent encounters "Is this coin fair?" it must recognize whether to invoke frequentist hypothesis testing or…
End-of-course assessments play important roles in the ongoing attempt to improve instruction in physics courses. Comparison of students' performance on assessments before and after instruction gives a measure of student learning. In…
Current concerns over reforming engineering education have focused attention on helping students develop skills and an adaptive expertise. Phenomenological guidelines for instruction along these lines can be understood as arising out of an…
Throughout the history of science, physics-based modeling has relied on judiciously approximating observed dynamics as a balance between a few dominant processes. However, this traditional approach is mathematically cumbersome and only…
We introduce PHYSICS, a comprehensive benchmark for university-level physics problem solving. It contains 1297 expert-annotated problems covering six core areas: classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical…
Measurements play a crucial role in doing physics: Their results provide the basis on which we adopt or reject physical theories. In this note, we examine the effect of subjecting measurements themselves to our experience. We require that…
Significant obstacles prevent large, university-level, introductory physics courses from effectively teaching problem-solving skills. We describe our program for integrating three internet-based "teaching-while-quizzing" tools to address…
Implementation of cognitive apprenticeship in an introductory physics lab group problem solving exercise may be mitigated by epistemic views toward physics of non-physics science majors. Quantitative pre-post data of the Force Concept…
The method of images (MoI) is a valuable technique for solving certain electrostatic boundary value problems consisting of charge density near conductor(s). We developed and validated an inquiry-based tutorial on MoI to help students learn…
In this article we describe special type of mathematical problems that may help develop teaching methods that motivate students to explore patterns, formulate conjectures and find solutions without only memorizing formulas and procedures.…
We discuss the development of interactive video tutorial-based problems to help introductory physics students learn effective problem solving heuristics. The video tutorials present problem solving strategies using concrete examples in an…
Studying for physics exams can be difficult and stressful, especially during a student's introductory year in physics. For students who do not plan to major in physics, the desire to do well is based less on understanding concepts and more…
An important problem in geometric reasoning is to find the configuration of a collection of geometric bodies so as to satisfy a set of given constraints. Recently, it has been suggested that this problem can be solved efficiently by…
The ability to derive precise spatial and physical insights is a cornerstone of vision-language models (VLMs), yet their poor performances in related spatial intelligence tasks such as physical reasoning remain a fundamental barrier. The…
Math word problems form a natural abstraction to a range of quantitative reasoning problems, such as understanding financial news, sports results, and casualties of war. Solving such problems requires the understanding of several…
"Self-diagnosis tasks" aim at fostering diagnostic behavior by explicitly requiring students to present diagnosis as part of the activity of reviewing their problem solutions. We have been investigating the extent to which introductory…
Doing mathematics implies three levels of manipulation: manipulating the abstract, manipulating symbols and manipulating logic. Teaching mathematics therefore involves the teacher proposing situations in which pupils can explore a small…
Many science education researchers have argued that learners' commitment to a substance (matter-based) ontology impedes the learning of scientific concepts that scientists typically conceptualize as processes or interactions, such as such…
We investigated the effects of student-generated problems on exams. The process was gradual with some training throughout the semester. Initial results were highly positive with the students involved performing significantly better, and…