Related papers: Probing Student Understanding With Alternative Que…
The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to…
Students' answers to tasks provide a valuable source of information in teaching as they result from applying cognitive processes to a learning content addressed in the task. Due to steadily increasing course sizes, analyzing student answers…
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.…
Research has shown that both high school and university students' reasoning patterns regarding direct current resistive electric circuits often differ from the currently accepted explanations. At present, there are no standard diagnostic…
The use of new technologies in higher education has surprisingly emphasized students' tendency to adopt a passive behavior in class. Participation and interaction of students are essential to improve academic results. This paper describes…
An important, yet largely unstudied, problem in student data analysis is to detect misconceptions from students' responses to open-response questions. Misconception detection enables instructors to deliver more targeted feedback on the…
In this note we report on an implementation of discovery-oriented problems in courses on Real Analysis and Differential Equations. We explain a type of task-design that gives students the opportunity to conjecture, refute and prove. What is…
Students sometimes produce code that works but that its author does not comprehend. For example, a student may apply a poorly-understood code template, stumble upon a working solution through trial and error, or plagiarize. Similarly,…
Formally investigating the sources of students' difficulties around specific subjects is crucial for developing appropriate strategies to help students. We have been studying difficulties in understanding magnetism encountered by students…
Research on reasoning in language models (LMs) predominantly focuses on improving the correctness of their outputs. But some important applications require modeling reasoning patterns that are incorrect. For example, automated systems that…
User queries are often underspecified and may admit multiple valid interpretations. Rather than silently making assumptions about the user's intent, a helpful assistant should surface such ambiguity by asking a clarifying question. Doing so…
Students are taught several models of conductivity, both at the introductory and the advanced level. From early macroscopic models of current flow in circuits, through the discussion of microscopic particle descriptions of electrons flowing…
Robots can learn the right reward function by querying a human expert. Existing approaches attempt to choose questions where the robot is most uncertain about the human's response; however, they do not consider how easy it will be for the…
Misleading or false information has been creating chaos in some places around the world. To mitigate this issue, many researchers have proposed automated fact-checking methods to fight the spread of fake news. However, most methods cannot…
Recent years have seen a dramatic expansion of tasks and datasets posed as question answering, from reading comprehension, semantic role labeling, and even machine translation, to image and video understanding. With this expansion, there…
Effective teaching relies on knowing what students know-or think they know. Revealing student thinking is challenging. Often used because of their ease of grading, even the best multiple choice (MC) tests, those using research based…
We discuss research involving the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) to evaluate one aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of teaching assistants (TAs): the knowledge of introductory students' alternate conceptions…
In a companion paper, we discuss students' ability to take advantage of what they learn from a solved problem and transfer their learning to solve a quiz problem that has different surface features but the same underlying physics…
A common way of learning to perform a task is to observe how it is carried out by experts. However, it is well known that for most tasks there is no unique way to perform them. This is especially noticeable the more complex the task is…
In the last several years, the field of computer assisted language learning has increasingly focused on computer aided question generation. However, this approach often provides test takers with an exhaustive amount of questions that are…