Related papers: Seeking instructional specificity: an example from…
Understanding how an instructional approach shapes student's cognitive resources and engagement is central to improving undergraduate physics education especially for novice learners. This study examines how three instructional modalities…
It is well-known that introductory physics students often have alternative conceptions that are inconsistent with established physical principles and concepts. Invoking alternative conceptions in quantitative problem-solving process can…
Students must learn effective problem solving strategies in order to develop expertise in physics. Effective problem solving strategies include a conceptual analysis of the problem followed by planning of the solution, and then…
Students' learning orientation, as applied towards learning problem solving, may be differentiated into learning a problem solving framework for its own sake, learning for the sake of doing well in the course, and non-goal-related…
When education researchers describe newly developed curricular materials, they typically concentrate on the research base behind their design, and the efficacy of the final products, but do not highlight the initial stages of creating the…
Homework in introductory physics represents an important part of a student's learning experience; therefore choosing the manner in which homework is presented merits investigation. We performed three rounds of clinical trials comparing the…
Is it possible to learn policies for robotic assembly that can generalize to new objects? We explore this idea in the context of the kit assembly task. Since classic methods rely heavily on object pose estimation, they often struggle to…
Covariational reasoning -- reasoning about how changes in one quantity relate to changes in another quantity -- has been examined extensively in mathematics education research. Little research has been done, however, on covariational…
A Random Graph is a random object which take its values in the space of graphs. We take advantage of the expressibility of graphs in order to model the uncertainty about the existence of causal relationships within a given set of variables.…
Most STEM students experience the introductory physics sequence in large-enrollment (N $\gtrsim$ 100 students) classrooms, led by one lecturer and supported by a few teaching assistants. This work describes methods and principles we used to…
We study the problem of experiment design to learn causal structures from interventional data. We consider an active learning setting in which the experimenter decides to intervene on one of the variables in the system in each step and uses…
A data-driven model where individual learning behavior is a linear combination of certain stylized learning patterns scaled by learners' affinities is proposed. The absorption of stylized behavior through the affinities constitutes…
Physics teaching in engineering programmes poses discipline-specific demands that intertwine conceptual modelling, experimental inquiry, and computational analysis. This study examines nine teaching competences for physics instruction…
We investigated the intersectional nature of race/racism and gender/sexism in broad scale inequities in physics student learning using a critical quantitative intersectionality. To provide transparency and create a nuanced picture of…
A competitive learning model was introduced in Ref. 1 (A. Mehta and J. M. Luck, Phys. Rev. E 60, 5, 1999), in which the learning is outcome-related. Every individual chooses between a pair of existing strategies or types, guided by a…
A good teacher should not only be knowledgeable, but should also be able to communicate in a way that the student understands -- to share the student's representation of the world. In this work, we introduce a new controlled experimental…
Recent work shows that in-context learning and optimization of in-context examples (ICE) can significantly improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on a wide range of tasks, leading to an apparent consensus that ICE optimization…
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…
Modeling Instruction (MI), an active-learning introductory physics curriculum, has been shown to improve student academic success. Peer-to-peer interactions play a salient role in the MI classroom. Their impact on student interest and…
The traditional pedagogical paradigm in physics is based on a deductive approach. However, with the recent advances in information technology, we are facing a dramatic increase in the amount of readily available information; hence, the…