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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…
Covariational reasoning -- reasoning about how changes in one quantity relate to changes in another quantity -- has been examined extensively in mathematics education research. Little research has been done, however, on covariational…
In designing an intelligent system that must be able to explain its reasoning to a human user, or to provide generalizations that the human user finds reasonable, it may be useful to take into consideration psychological data on what types…
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…
In this work, I present an automatic system for the evaluation of closed-type exercises in physics at the high school level or in the first year of a degree where physics is a mandatory course. It is expected that this will allow students…
One challenge (or opportunity!) that many instructors face is how varied the backgrounds, abilities, and interests of students are. In order to simultaneously instill confidence in those with weaker preparations and still challenge those…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by a variety of educators and physics education researchers. One reason for this extensive use is that many of the…
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…
Contributing to the literature on aptitude-treatment interactions between worked examples and problem-solving, this paper addresses differential learning from the two approaches when students are positioned as domain experts learning new…
Pencasts are videos of problem solving with narration by the problem solver. Pedagogically, students can create pencasts to illustrate their own problem solving to the instructor or to their peers. Pencasts have implications for teaching at…
Relating two quantities to describe a physical system or process is at the heart of "doing physics" for novices and experts alike. In this paper, we explore the ways in which experts use covariational reasoning when solving introductory…
Analogical reasoning plays a critical role in human cognition, enabling us to understand new concepts by associating them with familiar ones. Previous research in the AI community has mainly focused on identifying and generating analogies…
Consider the following problem: given a few demonstrations of a task across a few different objects, how can a robot learn to perform that same task on new, previously unseen objects? This is challenging because the large variety of objects…
Studying worked examples has been shown by extensive research to be an effective method for learning to solve well-structured problems in physics and mathematics. The effectiveness of learning with worked examples has been demonstrated and…
There is an increasing pressure for lecturers to work with two goals. First, they need to ensure their undergraduate students have a good grasp of the knowledge and skills of the intellectual field. In addition, they need to prepare…
We consider training probabilistic classifiers in the case of a large number of classes. The number of classes is assumed too large to perform exact normalisation over all classes. To account for this we consider a simple approach that…
Most students struggle when faced with complex and ill-structured tasks because the strategies taught in schools and universities simply require finding and applying the correct formulae or strategy to answer well-structured, algorithmic…
The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows, on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to understand…
Students of visualization come to formal education with an abundance of personal experience. However, one's exposure to graphics through media and education may not be sufficiently diverse to appreciate the nuance and complexity required to…
Parsons problems are a type of programming activity that present learners with blocks of existing code and requiring them to arrange those blocks to form a program rather than write the code from scratch. Micro Parsons problems extend this…