Related papers: "Never at rest": developing a conceptual framework…
Neurodiversity, the paradigm shift away from a pathologization of cognitive difference and towards a celebration of cognitive diversity, in an educational context has important implications on how educators structure their classes and on…
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…
Recruiting and retaining highly qualified physics and physical science teachers is critical for maintaining America's global competitiveness. Unfortunately, only one third of the high school teachers in physics have a degree in physics and…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
In 1901 the third Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures (CGPM) defined the weight of a body as ``the product of its mass and the acceleration due to gravity". In practical terms the weight force corresponds to the gravitational force.…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and framing. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for…
Recent work in set theory indicates that there are many different notions of 'set', each captured by a different collection of axioms, as proposed by J. Hamkins in [Ham11]. In this paper we strive to give one class theory that allows for a…
We conducted a literature review and expert interviews to determine the most common methods being used to teach quantum physics and quantum computing concepts to primary and secondary students. Based on the findings of this review, we…
We investigate student understanding of energy and momentum concepts at the level of introductory physics by designing and administering a 25-item multiple choice test and conducting individual interviews. We find that most students have…
The physics community explores and explains the physical world through a blend of theoretical and experimental studies. The future of physics as a discipline depends on training of students in both the theoretical and experimental aspects…
Most educational literature on conceptual change concerns the process by which introductory students acquire scientific knowledge. However, with modern developments in science and technology, the social significance of learning successive…
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…
This work formulates and gives grounds for general principles and theorems that question the energy function doctrine and its quantum version as a genuine law of nature without borders of adequacy. The emphasis is on the domain where the…
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…
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.…
It is usual in introductory courses of mechanics to develop the work and energy formalism from Newton's laws. On the other hand, literature analyzes the way in which forces transform under a change of reference frame. Notwithstanding, no…
Understanding degrees of freedom in classical mechanics is fundamental to characterizing physical systems. Counting them is usually easy, especially if we can assign them a clear meaning. However, the precise definition of a degree of…
Scientists who study how the brain solves problems have recently verified that, because of stringent limitations in working memory, where the brain solves problems, students must apply facts and algorithms that have previously been well…
This thesis explores how deep learning models learn over time, using ideas inspired by force analysis. Specifically, we zoom in on the model's training procedure to see how one training example affects another during learning, like…