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Dynamics problem solving is highly specific to the problem at hand and to develop the general mind framework to become an effective problem solver requires ingenuity and creativity on top of a solid grounding on theoretical and conceptual…
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…
Case-oriented physics education research - which seeks to refine and develop theory by linking that theory to cases - incorporates distinct practices for selecting data for analysis, generalizing results, and making causal claims.…
Group work is becoming increasingly common in introductory physics classrooms. Understanding how students engage in these group learning environments is important for designing and facilitating productive learning opportunities for…
We consider the use of Deep Learning methods for modeling complex phenomena like those occurring in natural physical processes. With the large amount of data gathered on these phenomena the data intensive paradigm could begin to challenge…
Much of the research done by modern physicists would be impossible without the use of computation. And yet, while computation is a crucial tool of practicing physicists, physics curricula do not generally reflect its importance and utility.…
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…
Many studies have investigated students' epistemological framing when solving physics problems. Framing supports students' problem solving as they decide what knowledge to employ and the necessary steps to solve the problem. Students may…
Quantum mechanics is a challenging subject, even for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Here, we discuss the development and evaluation of research-based concept tests for peer instruction as a formative assessment tool in…
In deciding on a student's grade in a class, an instructor generally needs to combine many individual grading judgments into one overall judgment. Two relatively common numerical scales used to specify individual grades are the 4-point…
Our main goal is to develop plans to increase physics enrollment. Once again we thoroughly analyze the problem from the beginning and reach the conclusion that the most appropriate starting point in this direction should be to look into…
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…
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…
This paper proposes a formal cognitive framework for problem solving based on category theory. We introduce cognitive categories, which are categories with exactly one morphism between any two objects. Objects in these categories are…
The perspectives of introductory classical physics students can often negatively influence how those students later interpret quantum phenomena when taking an introductory course in modern physics. A detailed exploration of student…
Physics faculty care about their students learning physics content. In addition, they usually hope that their students will learn some deeper lessons about thinking critically and scientifically. They hope that as a result of taking a…
The study of complex systems through the lens of category theory consistently proves to be a powerful approach. We propose that cognition deserves the same category-theoretic treatment. We show that by considering a highly-compact cognitive…
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…
Analogies help learners understand unfamiliar concepts by relating them to known concepts. Despite recent advances, large language models (LLMs) continue to struggle to generate analogies of comparable quality to those produced by humans.…
In this paper we investigate the extent to which students' problem-solving behaviors change as a result of working on multi-faceted, context-rich problems. During the semester, groups of two to three students work on several problems that…