Related papers: Problem Solving and Learning
In a series of well-known papers, Chi and Slotta (Chi, 1992; Chi & Slotta, 1993; Chi, Slotta & de Leeuw, 1994; Slotta, Chi & Joram, 1995; Chi, 2005; Slotta & Chi, 2006) have contended that a reason for students' difficulties in learning…
Modeling the creative mathematical sensemaking that characterizes expert thinking in physics is typically a struggle for new learners. To help students learn to reason this way, we created a set of supplemental activities called Physics…
Studying for physics exams can be difficult and stressful, especially during a student's introductory year in physics. For students who do not plan to major in physics, the desire to do well is based less on understanding concepts and more…
Parsons problems (PPs) have shown promise in structured problem solving by providing scaffolding that decomposes the problem and requires learners to reconstruct the solution. However, some students face difficulties when first learning…
We are interested in better understanding ways that students collaborate to solve conceptual physics problems in the context of spherical unit vectors in upper-level E&M, especially problems that have been shown to be difficult for students…
Research in cognitive science has provided extensive evidence of human cognitive ability in performing physical reasoning of objects from noisy perceptual inputs. Such a cognitive ability is commonly known as intuitive physics. With…
If spreadsheets are not erroneous then who, or what, is? Research has found that end-users are. If end-users are erroneous then why are they? Research has found that responsibility lies with human beings' fast and slow thinking modes and…
A hallmark of intelligence is the ability to autonomously learn new flexible, cognitive behaviors - that is, behaviors where the appropriate action depends not just on immediate stimuli (as in simple reflexive stimulus-response…
Computational physics is a key part of what it means to do physics in the twenty-first century. However, upper division computational physics remains a largely understudied area. We set out to understand the experiences of students in an…
Momentum exists in the physics community for integrating computation into the undergraduate curriculum. One of many benefits would be preparation for computational research. Our investigation poses the question of which computational skills…
We discuss a case study of the influence of epistemology on learning for a student in an introductory college physics course. An analysis of videotaped class work, written work, and interviews indicates that many of the student's…
Student content knowledge and general reasoning abilities are two important areas in education practice and research. However, there hasn't been much work in physics education that clearly documents the possible interactions between content…
Curriculum learning--ordering training examples in a sequence to aid machine learning--takes inspiration from human learning, but has not gained widespread acceptance. Static strategies for scoring item difficulty rely on indirect proxy…
Recent studies report that many machine reading comprehension (MRC) models can perform closely to or even better than humans on benchmark datasets. However, existing works indicate that many MRC models may learn shortcuts to outwit these…
In a companion paper, we discuss students' ability to take advantage of what they learn from a solved problem and transfer their learning to solve a quiz problem that has different surface features but the same underlying physics…
I think that the main reason why we do not understand the general principles of how knowledge works (and probably also the reason why we have not yet designed and built efficient machines capable of artificial intelligence), is not the…
Conflict in research teams was a near-ubiquitous phenomenon, with the three top issues being lack of respect or overconfidence, non-collegial behaviour and authorship. Most frequently involved (and perceived as most helpful) were informal…
Are we smarter now than Socrates was in his time? Society as a whole certainly enjoys a higher degree of education, but humans as a species probably don't get intrinsically smarter with time. Our knowledge base, however, continues to grow…
Scientific research's mandate is to comprehend and explore the world, as well as to improve it based on experience and knowledge. Knowledge embedding and knowledge discovery are two significant methods of integrating knowledge and data.…
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…