Related papers: Developing Mathematical Creativity with Physics In…
Over the past several decades, a large body of research has shown that undergraduate science students learn more and more equitably in active learning classrooms; however, the term "active learning" lacks definition and little research has…
As educators we often ask our physics students to work in groups---on tutorials, during in-class discussions, and on homework, projects, or exams. Researchers have documented the benefits of group work for students' conceptual mastery and…
We redesigned an advanced physics laboratory course to include a project component. The intention was to address learning outcomes such as modeling, design of experiments, teamwork, and developing technical skills in using apparatus and…
Human concept learning is typically active: learners choose which instances to query or test in order to reduce uncertainty about an underlying rule or category. Active concept learning must balance informativeness of queries against the…
We believe that economists have much to learn from educational research practices and related pedagogical innovations in other disciplines, in particular physics education. In this paper we identify three key features of physics education…
Learning to code, and more broadly, learning about computer science is a growing field of activity and research. Under the label of computational thinking, computational concepts are increasingly used as cognitive tools in many subject…
It is well-known that introductory physics students often have alternative conceptions that are inconsistent with established physical principles and concepts. Invoking alternative conceptions in quantitative problem-solving process can…
Statistical thinking partially depends upon an iterative process by which essential features of a problem setting are identified and mapped onto an abstract model or archetype, and then translated back into the context of the original…
This study investigates the impact of a novel application of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in physics instruction: engaging students in prompting, refining, and validating AI-constructed simulations of physical phenomena. In a…
Asking questions during class time is one form of participation not commonly employed by members of underrepresented groups in large enrollment college classrooms, even though the form of participation is highly conducive to student…
With the rise of large language models such as ChatGPT, interest has grown in understanding how these tools influence learning in STEM education, including physics. This study explores how students use ChatGPT during a physics…
Helping students become proficient problem solvers is a major goal of many physics courses from introductory to advanced levels. In fact, physics has often been used by cognitive scientists to investigate the differences between the…
Using 6 years of evaluation data we assess the medium- and long-term impacts upon a diverse range of students, teachers, and schools from participating in a programme of protracted university-mentored projects based in cutting-edge space…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by educators and physics education researchers. Many of the items on the FCI have strong distractor choices…
The introduction of active learning into physics education at the university level may be crucial for improved learning outcomes. In UNIST (Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology), introductory physics has been redesigned to…
In many science and engineering settings, system dynamics are characterized by governing PDEs, and a major challenge is to solve inverse problems (IPs) where unknown PDE parameters are inferred based on observational data gathered under…
Physics curricula across the US fail to prepare students adequately to solve problems, especially novel problems. A new curriculum, Matter and Interactions (M&I), was designed to improve student learning by organizing concepts around…
Students who serve as Learning Assistants (LAs) and have the opportunity to teach the content they are learning, while also studying effective teaching pedagogy, have demonstrated achievement gains in advanced content courses and positive…
This second paper in a multi-part series builds on the first, which introduced the Ways of Thinking for Engineering Design-based Physics (WoT4EDP) framework for STEM education in an introductory undergraduate physics course. Here, we apply…
Many students in introductory programming courses fare poorly in the code writing tasks of the final summative assessment. Such tasks are designed to assess whether novices have developed the analytical skills to translate from the given…