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Identifying and understanding student difficulties with physics content in a wide variety of topical areas is an active research area within the PER community. In many cases, physics topics appear multiple times in different contexts across…
The modern physics course is a crucial gateway for physics majors, introducing concepts beyond the scope of K-12 education. Despite its significance, content varies widely among institutions. This study analyzes 167 modern physics syllabi…
For several decades, scholars have studied cooperation and its outcomes in the educational context. Yet, we lack a complete understanding of how different instructional strategies impact the relationship between cooperation and learning.…
Prior research suggests that many students believe that the magnitude of the static frictional force is always equal to its maximum value. Here, we examine introductory students' ability to learn from analogical reasoning (with different…
We describe how graduate students categorize introductory mechanics problems based on the similarity of their solutions. Graduate students were asked at the end of a teaching assistant training class to categorize problems from their own…
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…
In an effort to improve the quality of citizen engagement in workplace, politics, and other domains in which quantitative reasoning plays an important role, Quantitative Literacy (QL) has become the focus of considerable research and…
Navigating the complexities of physics reasoning has long been a difficult task for Large Language Models (LLMs), requiring a synthesis of profound conceptual understanding and adept problem-solving techniques. In this study, we investigate…
One desired outcome of introductory physics instruction is that students will develop facility with reasoning quantitatively about physical phenomena. Little research has been done regarding how students develop the algebraic concepts and…
This paper re-centres the discussion of student learning in physics to focus on context. In order to do so, a theoretically-motivated understanding of context is developed. Given a well-defined notion of context, data from a novel…
Diversity has an important, multifaceted role in the success of education. I have used a corpus analysis of the first ten years of Physical Review Physics Education Research to investigate the diversity, broadly defined, of physics…
Recent language models exhibit strong reasoning capabilities, yet the influence of long-context capacity on reasoning remains underexplored. In this work, we hypothesize that current limitations in reasoning stem, in part, from insufficient…
Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. The Modeling Framework for Experimental Physics describes the process by which physicists revise their models to account for the newly…
This research focuses on the experiences of seven undergraduate women who were majoring in physics in a medium-size physics department at a small liberal arts college. In the semi-structured, empathetic interviews we conducted, the women…
Many physics instructors aim to support student sensemaking in their classrooms. However, this can be challenging since instances of sensemaking tend to be short-lived, with students often defaulting to approaches based on answer-making or…
Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to…
In this companion paper, we explore the use of isomorphic problem pairs (IPPs) to assess introductory physics students' ability to solve and successfully transfer problem-solving knowledge from one context to another in mechanics. We call…
Symbolic equations are one of the many representations used in physics. Understanding these representations is important for students because they are how students access knowledge in physics. In this paper I build off of the work by Redish…
We introduce PHYSICS, a comprehensive benchmark for university-level physics problem solving. It contains 1297 expert-annotated problems covering six core areas: classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical…
A common approach to solving physical reasoning tasks is to train a value learner on example tasks. A limitation of such an approach is that it requires learning about object dynamics solely from reward values assigned to the final state of…