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The Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (TUG-K) is a multiple choice test developed by Beichner in 1994 to assess students' understanding of kinematics graphs. Many of the items on the TUG-K have strong distractor choices which…
We report on preliminary results of a statistical study of student performance in more than a decade of calculus-based introductory physics courses. Treating average homework and test grades as proxies for student effort and comprehension…
Flipped classroom pedagogy is widely used in undergraduate mathematics to promote active learning, yet it remains unclear whether students experience it in systematically different ways. In this study, we analyze student perceptions from an…
A simple model to help students see the connections between a physics course and their engineering major is described. "Bridging" had positive effects on performance, attitude, and motivation, as measured by grade analyses, surveys, and…
Cognitive diagnosis, the goal of which is to obtain the proficiency level of students on specific knowledge concepts, is an fundamental task in smart educational systems. Previous works usually represent each student as a trainable…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than contexts, is considered a hallmark of expertise in physics problem solving. With inspiration from a classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, we compared…
Usually the first course in mathematics is calculus. Its a core course in the curriculum of the Business, Engineering and the Sciences. However many students face difficulties to learn calculus. These difficulties are often caused by the…
Expressing physics problems in the form of a mathematical model is one of the most important stages in the problem-solving process. Particularly in algebraic symbolization, understanding the meanings of signs and being able to manipulate…
Visual-graphical qubit representations offer a means to introduce abstract quantum concepts - such as quantum state, superposition, or measurement - in an accessible manner, particularly for learners with low prior knowledge. Building on a…
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…
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…
In ancient times, electricity was viewed as a spirit or soul residing in an inanimate substance. A fluid image was introduced in an attempt to visualize its movement. It was also an effort to concretize its nature into the realm of physical…
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…
This study uses social network analysis and the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS) to characterize six research-based introductory physics curricula. Peer Instruction, Modeling Instruction, ISLE, SCALE-UP,…
The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a multiple-choice survey that contains a variety of electricity and magnetism concepts from Coulomb's law to Faraday's law at the level of introductory physics used to help inform…
Traditionally, Electromagnetism is taught following the chronological development of the matter. The final product of this path is a presentation of Electromagnetism realized by adding one layer over another with the risk of transferring…
In the U.S., introductory calculus-based courses often acts as a gatekeeper to STEM degrees. But access to the prerequisite math is far from equal--students from low-income and racially marginalized communities are far less likely to have…
We present a method to study engagement level uniformity in a class of students. We validate our method by comparing two semesters taught using different methods in a physics and mathematics course. The first semester used conventional…
A clinical study was performed comparing the efficacy of multimedia learning modules with traditional textbooks for the first few topics of a calculus based introductory electricity and magnetism course. Students were randomly assigned to…
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.…