Related papers: Understanding students' difficulties in terms of c…

In contemporary educational systems, academic performance indicators play a central role in institutional evaluation and in the interpretation of student trajectories. However, under conditions of rapid technological change, the inferential…

Student engagement plays a vital role in academic success with high engagement often linked to positive educational outcomes. Traditionally, student engagement is measured through self-reports, which are both labour-intensive and not…

Research in student knowledge and learning of science has typically focused on explaining conceptual change. Recent research, however, documents the great degree to which student thinking is dynamic and context-sensitive, implicitly calling…

A sentence may express sentiments on multiple aspects. When these aspects are associated with different sentiment polarities, a model's accuracy is often adversely affected. We observe that multiple aspects in such hard sentences are mostly…

This paper introduces epistemic graphs as a generalization of the epistemic approach to probabilistic argumentation. In these graphs, an argument can be believed or disbelieved up to a given degree, thus providing a more fine--grained…

Students in inquiry science classrooms face an essential tension between sharing new ideas and critically evaluating those ideas. Both sides of this tension pose affective risks that can discourage further discussion, such as the…

Education is a goal-oriented field. But if we want to treat education scientifically so we can accumulate, evaluate, and refine what we learn, then we must develop a theoretical framework that is strongly rooted in objective observations…

Many studies have investigated students' epistemological framing when solving physics problems. Framing supports students' problem solving as they decide what knowledge to employ and the necessary steps to solve the problem. Students may…

Developing expertise in physics entails learning to use mathematics effectively and efficiently as applied to the context of physical situations. Doing so involves coordinating a variety of concepts and skills including mathematical…

Identifying and understanding student difficulties with physics content in a wide variety of topical areas is an active research area within the PER community. In many cases, physics topics appear multiple times in different contexts across…

Upper-division physics students spend much of their time solving problems. In addition to their basic skills and background, their epistemic framing can form an important part of their ability to learn physics from these problems.…

Prior research has shown that physics students often think about experimental procedures and data analysis very differently from experts. One key framework for analyzing student thinking has found that student thinking is more point-like,…

Why do people who disagree about one subject tend to disagree about other subjects as well? In this paper, we introduce a model to explore this phenomenon of "epistemic factionization". Agents attempt to discover the truth about multiple…

Prominent ethical and policy issues such as affirmative action and female enrollment in science and engineering revolve around the idea that diversity is good. However, even though diversity is an ambiguous concept, a precise definition is…

We use the theories of identity statuses and communities of practice to describe three different case studies of students finding their paths through undergraduate physics and developing a physics subject-specific identity. Each case study…

The notion of argumentation and the one of belief stand in a problematic relation to one another. On the one hand, argumentation is crucial for belief formation: as the outcome of a process of arguing, an agent might come to (justifiably)…

Each year perhaps millions of young people face the following dilemma: should I continue my education or rather start working with already acquired skills. Right decision must take into account somebody's own abilities, accessibility to…

Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to…

Prior research suggests that many students believe that the magnitude of the static frictional force is always equal to its maximum value. Here, we examine introductory students' ability to learn from analogical reasoning (with different…

We introduce an epistemic information measure between two data streams, that we term $influence$. Closely related to transfer entropy, the measure must be estimated by epistemic agents with finite memory resources via sampling accessible…