Related papers: Student understanding of the Boltzmann factor
The application of classical methods of statistical mechanics, originally developed by Ludwig Boltzmann in gas dynamics, to the description of social phenomena is a successful story that we try to outline in this paper. On one hand, it is…
This study presents a review of the current state of research on teaching quantum mechanics in secondary and lower undergraduate education. A conceptual approach to quantum mechanics is being implemented in more and more introductory…
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.…
Factor analysis is often used to assess whether a single univariate latent variable is sufficient to explain most of the covariance among a set of indicators for some underlying construct. When evidence suggests that a single factor is…
Student performance of virtual introductory physics class (calculus-based mechanics) is analyzed. A fully web-enhanced class was done synchronously. The analysis is done in two categories, averaging all mid-exams (or chapter exams) and…
Recent investigations have been carried out on critical analyses of beginning physics teachers confronted with questionable explanations. These studies raise the question of the choices made by teachers for their teaching once they have…
The central role of statistical literacy has been discussed extensively, emphasizing its importance as a learning outcome and in promoting a citizenry capable of interacting with the world in an informed and critical manner. Our work…
Although osmosis is a familiar phenomenon, and of pivotal importance in natural systems, it is seldom explained how it might work on the molecular level (if treated at all in physics text books). The standard treatment of osmosis in…
Previous research has found that introductory physics students perform far better on numeric problems than on otherwise equivalent symbolic problems. This paper describes a framework to explain these differences developed by analyzing…
Learning to use math in physics involves combining (blending) our everyday experiences and the conceptual ideas of physics with symbolic mathematical representations. Graphs are one of the best ways to learn to build the blend. They are a…
These lecture notes introduce some topics of classical statistical physics, particularly those that are relevant for neural networks and deep learning. Statistical physics is treated as a branch of probability theory or statistics, with the…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
Statistics educators recommend teaching with real data with relevant contexts, but defining relevancy is challenging and varies by student. We investigated whether providing student choice of data context increases engagement through a…
Causal understanding is important in many disciplines of science and engineering, where we seek to understand how different factors in the system causally affect an experiment or situation and pave a pathway towards creating effective or…
Despite the prevalence of physics education research literature related to problem solving, recent studies have illustrated that opportunities for ``authentic'' problem solving -- conceptualized as making decisions with limited information…
Simpson's Paradox is a well-known phenomenon in statistical science, where the relationship between the response variable $X$ and a certain explanatory factor of interest $A$ reverses when an additional factor $B_1$ is considered. This…
We investigate studnets' use of words used in everyday language as well as in physics. We find students are more likely to identify and explain the meaning of the word as it is used in physics when they have become familiar with the…
We explore the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with non-relativistic quantum mechanics of a single particle in one spatial dimension. To investigate these difficulties we developed a conceptual survey and…
The Boltzmann distribution describes a single parameter (temperature) family of probability distributions over a state space; at any given temperature, the ratio of probabilities of two states depends on their difference in energy. The same…
Representation learners that disentangle factors of variation have already proven to be important in addressing various real world concerns such as fairness and interpretability. Initially consisting of unsupervised models with independence…