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We are investigating cognitive issues in learning quantum mechanics in order to develop effective teaching and learning tools. The analysis of cognitive issues is particularly important for bridging the gap between the quantitative and…
Helping students become proficient problem solvers is a major goal of many physics courses from introductory to advanced levels. In fact, physics has often been used by cognitive scientists to investigate the differences between the…
Studying for physics exams can be difficult and stressful, especially during a student's introductory year in physics. For students who do not plan to major in physics, the desire to do well is based less on understanding concepts and more…
Laboratory courses for upper-division undergraduates often involve sophisticated equipment, relatively small class sizes, and extended hands-on projects. These courses present distinct challenges and opportunities for the physics education…
In this work, I present an automatic system for the evaluation of closed-type exercises in physics at the high school level or in the first year of a degree where physics is a mandatory course. It is expected that this will allow students…
We are interested in better understanding ways that students collaborate to solve conceptual physics problems in the context of spherical unit vectors in upper-level E&M, especially problems that have been shown to be difficult for students…
A primary goal of physics is to create mathematical models that allow both predictions and explanations of physical phenomena. We weave maths extensively into our physics instruction beginning in high school, and the level and complexity of…
Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students'…
Students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can profoundly influence their motivation to learn and development of expertise. We developed and validated an Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving survey by expanding…
In recent years there has been growing evidence that even after teaching designed to address the learning difficulties dictated by literature, many physics learners fail to create the proper reasoning chains that connect the fundamental…
Quantum information science and technology is a rapidly growing interdisciplinary field drawing researchers from science and engineering fields. Traditional instruction in quantum mechanics is insufficient to prepare students for research…
We discuss the development and evaluation of five research-based tutorials on Coulomb's law, superposition, symmetry and Gauss's Law to help students in the calculus-based introductory physics courses learn these concepts. We discuss the…
Scientific argumentation is a core science and engineering practice and a necessary 21st Century workforce skill. Due to the nature of large enrollment classes, it is difficult to individually assess students and provide feedback on their…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a give problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. A major focus while helping introductory physics students learn problem…
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…
We describe the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with quantum measurement within the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. We explore the possible origins of these difficulties by analyzing student…
We report on a large-scale study of student learning of quantum tunneling in 4 traditional and 4 transformed modern physics courses. In the transformed courses, which were designed to address student difficulties found in previous research,…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than surface features or contexts, is considered one of several proxy predictors of expertise in problem solving. With inspiration from the classic study by Chi,…
This is the first part of a series of papers aiming to show how trigonometry and analytic tools can help into tackling demanding Olympiad geometry problems. We present several novel techniques for tackling hard problems from various…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in mathematical problem-solving, but evaluation has largely focused on problems that have exact analytical solutions or involve formal proofs, often overlooking approximation-based…