Related papers: Challenges in Analogical Reasoning
The analogy of classical repulsive interactions emerging from the exchange of mediating particles is revisited with a quantitative approach. Simulations are presented for a particular toy model which are accessible to undergraduate students…
We investigate studnets' use of words used in everyday language as well as in physics. We find students are more likely to identify and explain the meaning of the word as it is used in physics when they have become familiar with the…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving the problem. A major focus while helping introductory physics students learn problem…
Teaching logic effectively requires an understanding of the factors which cause logic students to struggle. Formalization exercises, which require the student to produce a formula corresponding to the natural language sentence, are a good…
Learning to use math in science is a non-trivial task. It involves many different skills (not usually taught in a math class) that help blend physical knowledge with mathematical symbology. One of these is the idea of quantification: that…
As part of a larger study to understand instructors' considerations regarding the learning and teaching of problem solving in an introductory physics course, we investigated beliefs of first-year graduate teaching assistants (TAs) regarding…
Teaching an agent to perform new tasks using natural language can easily be hindered by ambiguities in interpretation. When a teacher provides an instruction to a learner about an object by referring to its features, the learner can…
Learning to think like a physicist (LTP) is often cited as a central goal of graduate physics education, yet what this means in practice and the extent to which physics graduate education prepares students to develop LTP and view LTP as…
Analogs of fundamental physical phenomena can be used in two ways. One way consists in reproducing specific aspects of classical or quantum gravity, of quantum fields in curved space or of other high-energy scenarios, on lower-energy…
Asymptotic analysis provides powerful insights into physical systems by examining their behavior in limiting cases. This paper explores how extending this advanced methodology to high school physics education can deepen conceptual…
It has been reported that students often leave the introductory physics classroom believing that physics is less connected to the real world than when they entered. In this paper we aim to complicate that narrative by considering students'…
One of the major difficulties in learning physics is for students to develop a conceptual understanding of the core concepts of physics. Many authors have argued that student conceptions of basic physical phenomena are rooted in basic…
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…
We examine the relationship between homework completion and exam performance for students having different physics aptitudes for five different semesters of an introductory electricity and magnetism course. In our analysis, we plot exam…
When deploying online homework in physics courses, an important consideration is how many attempts should be allowed in order to solve numerical free-response problems. While on the one hand, the maximum number of attempts should be large…
The Hopfield model, originally inspired by spin-glass physics, occupies a central place at the intersection of statistical mechanics, neural networks, and modern artificial intelligence. Despite its conceptual simplicity and broad…
The rapid advancement of embodied intelligence and world models has intensified efforts to integrate physical laws into AI systems, yet physical perception and symbolic physics reasoning have developed along separate trajectories without a…
An assumed attribute of expert physicists is that they learn readily from their own mistakes. Experts are unlikely to make the same mistakes when asked to solve a problem a second time, especially if they have had access to a correct…
The ability to flexibly transform between different representations (e.g., from mathematical to graphical representations) of the same concept is a hallmark of expertise. Prior research suggests that many introductory physics students show…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. One major focus while helping introductory physics students learn effective…