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Our understanding about things is conceptual. By stating that we reason about objects, it is in fact not the objects but concepts referring to them that we manipulate. Now, so long just as we acknowledge infinitely extending notions such as…
Teaching an agent to perform new tasks using natural language can easily be hindered by ambiguities in interpretation. When a teacher provides an instruction to a learner about an object by referring to its features, the learner can…
Many professional physicists do not fully understand the implications of the Einstein equivalence principle of general relativity. Consequently, many are unaware of the fact that special relativity is fully capable of handling accelerated…
In the search for more effective education, there is a widespread effort to develop better approaches to personalize student education. Unassisted, educators often do not have time or resources to personally support every student in a given…
Very little is known about how the nature of expertise in introductory and advanced courses compares in knowledge-rich domains such as physics. We develop a framework to compare the similarities and differences between learning and patterns…
A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in…
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…
A teacher's knowledge base consists of knowledge of mathematics content, knowledge of student epistemology, and pedagogical knowledge. It has severe implications on the understanding of student's knowledge of content, and the learning…
Introducing gravitational physics at high school provides educational means for bridging the gap between the image of science held by students and science itself. Natural language is fundamental in this learning. It engages students in…
We discuss the clusters of resources that emerge when upper-division students write about electromagnetic fields in linear materials. The data analyzed for this paper comes from students' written tests in an upper-division electricity and…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about knowledge and learning can hinder them from…
There are investigated the generalized methods of cognition of the Existing, i.e. everything that is able to influence to the cognizer, and everything differed from the Existing is postulated as indistinguishable from the non-existing and…
Covariational reasoning--considering how changes in one quantity affect another, related quantity--is a foundation of quantitative modeling in physics. Understanding quantitative models is a learning objective of introductory physics…
Learning advanced physics, in general, is challenging not only due to the increased mathematical sophistication but also because one must continue to build on all of the prior knowledge acquired at the introductory and intermediate levels.…
Physics students can encounter difficulties in physics problem solving as a result of failing to use knowledge that they have but do not perceive as relevant or appropriate. In previous work the authors have demonstrated that some of these…
Quantum mechanics can seem like a departure from everyday experience of the physical world, but constructivist theories assert that learners build new ideas from their existing ones. To explore how students can navigate this tension, we…
Lexical Semantics is concerned with how words encode mental representations of the world, i.e., concepts . We call this type of concepts, classification concepts . In this paper, we focus on Visual Semantics , namely on how humans build…
Learning physics requires understanding the applicability of fundamental principles in a variety of contexts that share deep features. One way to help students learn physics is via analogical reasoning. Students can be taught to make an…
We suggest a lecture on Newtonian gravity, discussing how the use of the scientific method allows to rule out some of the models for the shape of Earth leaving a spherical Earth as the only possibility, in agreement with empirical…
In order to describe natural phenomena, science develops sophisticated models that use mathematical and formal languages which seem, and often are, very far from common experience. When a phenomenon is not accessible to our senses, its…