Related papers: Nonlinear Psychometric Thresholds for Physics and …
Analyzing students' written solutions to physics questions is a major area in PER. However, gauging student understanding in college courses is bottlenecked by large class sizes, which limits assessments to a multiple-choice (MC) format for…
U.S. state education agencies mark schools displaying achievement gaps between demographic subgroups as needing improvement. Some schools may have few students in these subgroups, such that average end-of-year test scores only noisily…
Width parameterizations of SAT, such as tree-width and path-width, enable the study of computationally more tractable and practical SAT instances. We give two simple algorithms. One that runs simultaneously in time-space…
An NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem $\Pi$ is said to have an {\em approximation threshold} if there is some $t$ such that the optimal value of $\Pi$ can be approximated in polynomial time within a ratio of $t$, and it is NP-hard…
Previous studies have used a specific success metric within an algorithmic search framework to prove machine learning impossibility results. However, this specific success metric prevents us from applying these results on other forms of…
The persistent underrepresentation of women and other gender minorities in physical science fields has been an ongoing concern. This study investigates gender dynamics in introductory physics laboratory courses, focusing on whether students…
This article provides brief guidance for a successful graduate teaching assistantship at our school. Although the components mentioned in this article are primarily aimed at mathematics courses designated as the "Basic Science and…
In the Max $k$-Weight SAT (aka Max SAT with Cardinality Constraint) problem, we are given a CNF formula with $n$ variables and $m$ clauses together with a positive integer $k$. The goal is to find an assignment where at most $k$ variables…
While acute stress has been shown to have both positive and negative effects on performance, not much is known about the impacts of stress on students grades during examinations. To answer this question, we examined whether a correlation…
This paper investigates the (conditional) quasi-likelihood ratio test for the threshold in MA models. Under the hypothesis of no threshold, it is shown that the test statistic converges weakly to a function of the centred Gaussian process.…
Nisan and Szegedy (CC 1994) showed that any Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}$ that depends on all its input variables, when represented as a real-valued multivariate polynomial $P(x_1,\ldots,x_n)$, has degree at least $\log…
The probability of an event is in the range of [0, 1]. In a sample space S, the value of probability determines whether an outcome is true or false. The probability of an event Pr(A) that will never occur = 0. The probability of the event…
We explore the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with non-relativistic quantum mechanics of a single particle in one spatial dimension. To investigate these difficulties we developed a conceptual survey and…
There is a significant underrepresentation of women in many Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) majors and careers. Prior research has shown that self-efficacy can be a critical factor in student learning, and that…
For at least 40 years, there has been debate and disagreement as to the role of mathematics in the computer science curriculum. This paper presents the results of an analysis of the math requirements of 199 Computer Science BS/BA degrees…
We discuss a study in a first year college introductory physics course for physical science and engineering majors that shows that women, on average, feel less recognized by their physics instructors than men as students who can excel in…
Historically, physics has been a predominantly male field, with previous literature showing there is little diversity amongst U.S. physics students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Recent research indicates that the lack of…
Physics community is generally concerned about the decrease in Physics enrollment. Due to the deficiency of specially qualified Physics teachers, high school Physics is sometimes taught by general science teachers who may not be trained to…
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced new possibilities and challenges in physics education, necessitating rigorous evaluation of their capabilities as both problem solvers and automated assessors. This paper…
Parity-SAT is the problem of determining whether a given CNF formula has an odd number of satisfying assignments. As a canonical $\oplus$P-complete problem, it represents a fundamental variant of the exact model counting problem (#SAT).…