Related papers: Model-Based Reasoning in the Upper-Division Physic…

Compared with introductory physics, relatively little is known about the development of expertise in advanced physics courses, especially in the case of quantum mechanics. Here, we describe a framework for understanding the patterns of…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in education, yet their correctness alone does not capture the quality, reliability, or pedagogical validity of their problem-solving behavior, especially in mathematics, where…

Research in cognitive science has provided extensive evidence of human cognitive ability in performing physical reasoning of objects from noisy perceptual inputs. Such a cognitive ability is commonly known as intuitive physics. With…

Learning to create, use, and evaluate models is a central element of becoming a scientist. In physics, we often begin an analysis of a complex system with highly simplified or toy models. In introductory physics classes, we tend to use them…

This second paper in a multi-part series builds on the first, which introduced the Ways of Thinking for Engineering Design-based Physics (WoT4EDP) framework for STEM education in an introductory undergraduate physics course. Here, we apply…

Scientific research involves mathematical modelling in the context of an interactive balance between theory, experiment and computation. However, computational methods and tools are still far from being appropriately integrated in the high…

The Engage to Excel (PCAST) report, the National Research Council's Framework for K-12 Science Education, and the Next Generation Science Standards all call for transforming the physics classroom into an environment that teaches students…

Writing is an integral part of the process of science. In the undergraduate physics curriculum, the most common place that students engage with scientific writing is in lab classes, typically through lab notebooks, reports, and proposals.…

The rise of foundation models -- large, pretrained machine learning models that can be finetuned to a variety of tasks -- has revolutionized the fields of natural language processing and computer vision. In high-energy physics, the question…

At the University of Colorado Boulder, as part of our broader efforts to transform middle- and upper-division physics courses, we research students' difficulties with particular concepts, methods, and tools in classical mechanics,…

The paper describes a curricular framework for introducing microcontroller programming in the University Physics lab. The approach makes use of Modeling Instruction, an effective approach for teaching science at the secondary level in which…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in structured reasoning and symbolic tasks, with coding emerging as a particularly successful application. This progress has naturally motivated efforts to extend these…

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…

Vision systems to see and reason about the compositional nature of visual scenes are fundamental to understanding our world. The complex relations between objects and their locations, ambiguities, and variations in the real-world…

Dialogue systems are a popular natural language processing (NLP) task as it is promising in real-life applications. It is also a complicated task since many NLP tasks deserving study are involved. As a result, a multitude of novel works on…

Nonlinear models and optimization methods have successfully tackled a rapidly growing set of problems in recent years. Indeed, a relatively small toolbox of such models and methods can provide sufficient performance across a large landscape…

Upper-division physics students spend much of their time solving problems. In addition to their basic skills and background, their epistemic framing can form an important part of their ability to learn physics from these problems.…

Heliophysics theory and modeling build understanding from fundamental principles to motivate, interpret, and predict observations. Together with observational analysis, they constitute a comprehensive scientific program in heliophysics. As…

In recent years, large language models have achieved breakthroughs on a wide range of benchmarks in natural language processing and continue to increase in performance. Recently, the advances of large language models have raised interest…

Group work is becoming increasingly common in introductory physics classrooms. Understanding how students engage in these group learning environments is important for designing and facilitating productive learning opportunities for…