Related papers: Assessing Learning in Small Sized Physics Courses

Computation is becoming an increasingly important part of physics education. However, there are currently few theories of learning that can be used to help explain and predict the unique challenges and affordances associated with…

The objectives of physics laboratory courses include fostering conceptual understanding and development of several important cognitive, psycho-motor, attitudinal and affective abilities. In most of the Indian colleges and universities (and…

Acquiring the mathematical, conceptual, and problem-solving skills required in university-level physics courses is hard work, and the average student often lacks the knowledge and study skills they need to succeed in the introductory…

Small language models (SLMs) enable low-cost, private, on-device inference, but they often fail on problems that require specialized domain knowledge or multi-step reasoning. Existing approaches for improving reasoning either rely on scale…

Argument mining algorithms analyze the argumentative structure of essays, making them a valuable tool for enhancing education by providing targeted feedback on the students' argumentation skills. While current methods often use encoder or…

Partial-label learning (PLL) generally focuses on inducing a noise-tolerant multi-class classifier by training on overly-annotated samples, each of which is annotated with a set of labels, but only one is the valid label. A basic promise of…

Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students'…

Automated short answer grading (ASAG) with large language models (LLMs) is commonly evaluated with aggregate metrics such as macro-F1 and Cohen's kappa. However, these metrics provide limited insight into how grading performance varies…

We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students'…

Introductory physics labs can be designed and studied using the Communities of Practice framework, where a group of members pursues a common set of goals by learning and implementing a set of practices. Studies of student preferences and…

Recently, the reasoning capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs), such as DeepSeek-R1, have seen significant advancements through the slow thinking process. Despite these achievements, the substantial computational demands of LRMs…

Working effectively with large, existing software systems requires strong comprehension skills, yet most graduates enter the industry with little preparation for this challenge. We report early results from a pilot intervention integrated…

An active learning physics course (treatment) was re-organized in an attempt to increase students' problem solving abilities. This re-organized course covered all of the relevant concepts in the first 6 weeks with the final 4 weeks spent in…

Developing expertise in physics requires appropriate integration and assimilation of physics and mathematics. Instructors and students often describe physics courses in terms of their emphasis on conceptual and quantitative problem-solving.…

The probabilistic learning on manifolds (PLoM) introduced in 2016 has solved difficult supervised problems for the ``small data'' limit where the number N of points in the training set is small. Many extensions have since been proposed,…

Modeling the creative mathematical sensemaking that characterizes expert thinking in physics is typically a struggle for new learners. To help students learn to reason this way, we created a set of supplemental activities called Physics…

Single particle models are sufficient for many topics in introductory physics courses, but become misleading when applied to situations involving changes in internal energy. This paper merges two parallel attempts to reform the teaching of…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable improvements in reasoning and many existing benchmarks have been addressed by models such as o1 and o3 either fully or partially. However, a majority of these benchmarks emphasize deductive…

University students taking introductory physics are generally successful executing mathematical procedures in context, but often struggle with the use of mathematical concepts for sense making. Physics instructors note that their students…

Evaluating the abilities of learners is a fundamental objective in the field of education. In particular, there is an increasing need to assess higher-order abilities such as expressive skills and logical thinking. Constructed-response…