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The ability to make decisions based on data, with its inherent uncertainties and variability, is a complex and vital skill in the modern world. The need for such quantitative critical thinking occurs in many different contexts, and while it…
Inequities in student access to trigonometry and calculus are often associated with racial and socioeconomic privilege, and often influence introductory physics course performance. To mitigate these disparities in student preparedness, we…
In recent years there has been growing evidence that even after teaching designed to address the learning difficulties dictated by literature, many physics learners fail to create the proper reasoning chains that connect the fundamental…
We describe the development of a junior-senior level course for Physics majors designed to teach Mathematica skills in support of their undergraduate coursework, but also to introduce students to modern research level results. Standard…
Background: As traditional coding tasks in education become increasingly vulnerable to the use of Generative AI, there is a critical need for authentic, project-based assessments that evaluate students' scientific inquiry. To address this…
Despite the significant amount of time undergraduate students spend in introductory physics labs, there is little consensus on instructional goals and accepted diagnostic assessments for these labs. In response to these issues, we have…
Physics education researchers have argued that authentic physics education includes computation as part of a physics student's training, and many parties have made efforts towards this goal. However, most research on this teaching modality…
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…
Although physics has become increasingly computational, with computing even being considered the third pillar of physics, it is still not well integrated into physics education. Research suggests that integrating Computational Thinking (CT)…
Although an important goal of introductory physics labs is to train students in scientific reasoning and critical thinking, currently there are no standard tests in physics designed to assess such skills. We are in the process of developing…
We discuss the development of interactive video tutorial-based problems to help introductory physics students learn effective problem solving heuristics. The video tutorials present problem solving strategies using concrete examples in an…
Computational thinking in physics has many different forms, definitions, and implementations depending on the level of physics, or the institution it is presented in. In order to better integrate computational thinking in introductory…
A central goal of Introductory Physics for the Life Sciences (IPLS) is to prepare students to use physics to model and analyze biological situations, a skill of increasing importance for their future studies and careers. Here we report our…
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…
The research presented in this thesis was motivated by the need to improve introductory physics courses. Introductory physics courses are generally the first courses in which students learn to create models to solve complex problems.…
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…
An appropriate diagram is a required element of a solution building process in physics problem solving and it can transform a given problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving the problem. A major focus while helping…
Computational thinking has been a recent focus of education research within the sciences. However, there is a dearth of scholarly literature on how best to teach and to assess this topic, especially in disciplinary science courses. Physics…
We investigated physics students' learning experience and behaviour in a second-year laboratory by analyzing transcribed audio recordings of laboratory sessions. One student group was given both a problem and procedure and asked to analyze…
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…