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Diagrams are ubiquitous in physics, especially in physics education and physics problem solving. Problem solvers may generate diagrams to orient to a scenario, to organize information, to directly extract an answer, or as a tool of…
Automated methods are becoming increasingly integrated into studies of formative feedback on students' science explanation writing. Most of this work, however, addresses students' responses to short answer questions. We investigate…
How students use mathematics in their physics classes has been studied extensively in the physics education literature. In addition to specific mathematical methods in specific physics contexts, possible effects of more general "cultural"…
Despite nation efforts to promote diversity and inclusion, women and gender minorities remain underrepresented in physics. One common approach to studying gender in physics contexts treats gender as a categorical identity variable (e.g.…
Physics education research has probed for the relevance of physics in students' everyday lives. Attitudinal and epistemological surveys have asked students if they think of or use physics in their daily lives. We have previously documented…
A variety of activities are commonly used in college physics courses including lab, tutorials, and studio curricula. Instructors must choose among using research-based activities, designing their own activities or modifying existing…
This paper introduces a testable model for physics-specific student engagement at the onset of task processing in response to a task-specific motivational stimulus. Empirical research provides evidence that contextual embedding of a task…
Reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, enabling adaptive decision-making in complex and unfamiliar scenarios. In contrast, machine intelligence remains bound to training data, lacking the ability to dynamically refine solutions at…
Understanding size and scale (USS) and order-of-magnitude reasoning (OMR) are critical for scientific literacy. This study examines an educational approach to enhance these skills in high school science, considering the cognitive…
A national survey of physics faculty was conducted to investigate the prevalence and nature of computational instruction in physics courses across the United States. 1246 faculty from 357 unique institutions responded to the survey. The…
We have been investigating the difficulties that students in upper-level undergraduate courses have in determining the probability distribution for measuring energy and position as a function of time when the initial wave function is…
Integrating computation into physics teaching is a curricular move that, at present, has been predominately studied for its cognitive impacts. However, if this modality of instruction shifts how students engage with physics, we argue there…
Given a physics scenario, different problem types presenting that scenario in various ways can emphasize different instructional goals. In this investigation, we examined the views of physics graduate teaching assistants (TAs) about the…
Classical planning asks for a sequence of operators reaching a given goal. While the most common case is to compute a plan, many scenarios require more than that. However, quantitative reasoning on the plan space remains mostly unexplored.…
Research in student knowledge and learning of science has typically focused on explaining conceptual change. Recent research, however, documents the great degree to which student thinking is dynamic and context-sensitive, implicitly calling…
Undergraduate physics education has greatly benefited from the introduction of computational activities. However, despite the benefits computation has delivered, we still lack a complete understanding of the computationally integrated…
The ability to emotionally or intellectually understand another person's thoughts and feelings-empathy-can foster critical connections that facilitate learning and collaboration. We present a case study of physics faculty that examines…
Societal stereotypes and biases pertaining to who belongs in physics and who can excel in physics can impact motivational beliefs, e.g., of women and racial and ethnic minority students in physics courses. This study investigates how the…
Among the many decisions to be made in their teaching practice, physics teachers must decide how to explain each particular phenomenon to students. This study explores student teachers' (STs) decision-making process when presented with…
We examined how introductory physics students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving compare to those of introductory astronomy students, using a previously validated survey, the Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving (AAPS)…