Related papers: Comparing large lecture mechanics curricula using …
This paper explores using large isomorphic problem banks to overcome many challenges of traditional exams in large STEM classes, especially the threat of content sharing websites and generative AI to the security of exam items. We first…
We investigated the impact of incorporating quantitative reasoning for deeper sense-making in a Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial (QuILT) on students' conceptual performance using a framework emphasizing integration of conceptual and…
A vast amount of instruction tuning data is crucial for the impressive performance of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), but the associated computational costs and data collection demands during supervised fine-tuning make it impractical for…
Modeling the creative mathematical sensemaking that characterizes expert thinking in physics is typically a struggle for new learners. To help students learn to reason this way, we created a set of supplemental activities called Physics…
A national survey of physics faculty was conducted to investigate the prevalence and nature of computational instruction in physics courses across the United States. 1246 faculty from 357 unique institutions responded to the survey. The…
Undergraduate physics students are known to have difficulties with understanding mathematical tools, and with applying their knowledge of mathematics to physical contexts. Using survey statements based on student interviews and written…
Students who successfully engage in self-regulated learning, are able to plan their own studying, monitoring their progress and make any necessary adjustments based upon the data and feedback they gather. In order to promote this type of…
Introductory algebra-based physics courses frequently feature multiple student major populations in the same course section, however, different majors' requirements may impact students' motivations towards different aspects of the course…
Prior research suggests that using evidence-based pedagogies can not only improve learning for all students, it can also reduce the gender gap. We describe the impact of physics education research based pedagogical techniques in flipped and…
At large institutions of higher education, students frequently have a choice whether to attend the introductory physics sequence asynchronously online, on-site in a traditional lecture-setting, or in a reformed studio setting. In this…
A vast scientific literature in physics education documents a general widespread difficulty in dealing with Electro-Magnetic Induction (EMI) at various levels of instruction. But, at the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of research…
Assessing student performance becomes challenging when course enrollment becomes very large (~10^4 students). As part of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in introductory physics offered by Georgia Tech in 2013, students submitted video…
We investigate student understanding of energy and momentum concepts at the level of introductory physics by designing and administering a 25-item multiple choice test and conducting individual interviews. We find that most students have…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than contexts, is considered a hallmark of expertise in physics problem solving. With inspiration from a classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, we compared…
The set of polarizing force-identification (PFI) questions in the FCI consists of six items all basically asking only one question: the set of forces acting on a given body. Although it may sound trivial, these questions are among the most…
A survey was developed to probe student understanding of quantum mechanics at the beginning of graduate instruction. The survey was administered to 202 physics graduate students enrolled in first-year quantum mechanics courses from seven…
Student-to-student interactions are foundational to many active learning environments, but are most often studied using qualitative methods. Network analysis tools provide a quantitative complement to this picture, allowing researchers to…
Syllabuses for curriculum learning have been developed on an ad-hoc, per task basis and little is known about the relative performance of different syllabuses. We identify a number of syllabuses used in the literature. We compare the…
We investigated the difficulties that physics students in upper-level undergraduate quantum mechanics and graduate students after quantum and statistical mechanics core courses have with the Fermi energy, the Fermi-Dirac distribution and…
Curriculum learning, a training technique where data is presented to the model in order of example difficulty (e.g., from simpler to more complex documents), has shown limited success for pre-training language models. In this work, we…