Related papers: Student understanding of the Boltzmann factor
A freely available educational application (a mobile website) is presented. This provides access to educational material and drilling on selected topics within mathematics and statistics with an emphasis on tablets and mobile phones. The…
We report on the development of students' ideas of probability and probability density in a University of Maine laboratory-based general education physics course called Intuitive Quantum Physics. Students in the course are generally math…
Data analysis is a powerful tool in all experimental sciences. Statistical methods, such as sampling theory, computer technologies necessary for handling large amounts of data, skill in analysing information contained in different types of…
In many longitudinal settings, economic theory does not guide practitioners on the type of restrictions that must be imposed to solve the rotational indeterminacy of factor-augmented linear models. We study this problem and offer several…
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…
We developed a survey to probe student understanding of quantum mechanics concepts at the beginning of graduate instruction. The survey was administered to 202 graduate students in physics enrolled in first-year quantum mechanics courses…
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…
There is widespread emphasis on reform in the teaching of introductory statistics at the college level. Underpinning this reform is a consensus among educators and practitioners that traditional curricular materials and pedagogical…
We provide a detailed exposition of the connections between Boltzmann machines commonly utilized in machine learning problems and the ideas already well known in quantum statistical mechanics through Feynman's description of the same. We…
Asking questions during class time is one form of participation not commonly employed by members of underrepresented groups in large enrollment college classrooms, even though the form of participation is highly conducive to student…
We have studied the impact of incoming preparation and demographic variables on student performance on the final exam in physics 1, the standard introductory, calculus-based mechanics course This was done at three different institutions…
We examine the difficulties that introductory physics students, undergraduate physics majors, and physics graduate students have with concepts related to conductors and insulators covered in introductory physics by giving written tests and…
We present a concise derivation of the Boltzmann form for single-particle energy distributions in classical many-body Hamiltonian systems. The derivation relies on two physical facts: coarse-graining-scale invariance of the empirical…
Textbooks in applied mathematics often use graphs to explain the meaning of formulae, even though their benefit is still not fully explored. To test processes underlying this assumed multimedia effect we collected performance scores, eye…
Problem. Educational disparities in Mathematics performance are a persistent challenge. This study aims to unravel the complex factors contributing to these disparities among students internationally, with a focus on the interpretability of…
One of the key skills of a researcher is noticing what's going on. Both in the experiment one's performing and in one's data: is there something interesting, reason to doubt one's data or suspect that one's theoretical description is…
The statistical models used to derive the results of experimental analyses are of incredible scientific value and are essential information for analysis preservation and reuse. In this paper, we make the scientific case for systematically…
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,…
Quantum mechanics is a field often considered very mathematical, abstract, and unintuitive. One way some instructors are hoping to help familiarize their students with these complex topics is to have the students see quantum effects in…
Covariational reasoning -- how one thinks about the way changes in one quantity affect another quantity -- is essential to calculus and physics instruction alike. As physics is often centered on understanding and predicting changes in…