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In a recent report, the American Association of Physics Teachers has developed an updated set of recommendations for curriculum of undergraduate physics labs.1 This document focuses on six major themes: constructing knowledge, modeling,…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
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…
Learning a model of perceptual similarity from a collection of objects is a fundamental task in machine learning underlying numerous applications. A common way to learn such a model is from relative comparisons in the form of triplets:…
As part of a larger study to understand instructors' considerations regarding the learning and teaching of problem solving in an introductory physics course, we investigated beliefs of first-year graduate teaching assistants (TAs) regarding…
Many instructors choose to assess their students using open-ended written exam items that require students to show their understanding of physics by solving a problem and/or explaining a concept. Grading these items is fairly time…
While decision theory provides an appealing normative framework for representing rich preference structures, eliciting utility or value functions typically incurs a large cost. For many applications involving interactive systems this…
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…
It is known that from purely observational data, a causal DAG is identifiable only up to its Markov equivalence class, and for many ground truth DAGs, the direction of a large portion of the edges will be remained unidentified. The golden…
Research in analogical reasoning suggests that higher-order cognitive functions such as abstract reasoning, far transfer, and creativity are founded on recognizing structural similarities among relational systems. Here we integrate theories…
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…
Instruct models, obtained from various instruction tuning or post-training steps, are commonly deemed superior and more usable than their base counterpart. While the model gains instruction following ability, instruction tuning may lead to…
Modeling complex physical dynamics is a fundamental task in science and engineering. Traditional physics-based models are sample efficient, and interpretable but often rely on rigid assumptions. Furthermore, direct numerical approximation…
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…
In this companion paper, we explore the use of isomorphic problem pairs (IPPs) to assess introductory physics students' ability to solve and successfully transfer problem-solving knowledge from one context to another in mechanics. We call…
We believe that economists have much to learn from educational research practices and related pedagogical innovations in other disciplines, in particular physics education. In this paper we identify three key features of physics education…
In this paper, we describe two paradigms in physics education research (PER): recurrence-oriented and case-oriented PER. We connect theory on research methodologies in the social sciences to interviews with physics education researchers and…
The technological and digital reality has broadly expanded, reaching the school. Therefore, this research aims to develop a didactic sequence, using as strategy a comic book, Figures, Gifs and videos, programs for activities applied to…
Helping students learn to think like a physicist is an important goal of many introductory physics courses. One characteristic distinguishing more experienced physicists from novice students is that they make better use of problem solving…