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An important, yet largely unstudied, problem in student data analysis is to detect misconceptions from students' responses to open-response questions. Misconception detection enables instructors to deliver more targeted feedback on the…
We propose to solve inverse problems involving the temporal evolution of physics systems by leveraging recent advances from diffusion models. Our method moves the system's current state backward in time step by step by combining an…
The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about knowledge and learning can hinder them from…
Student beliefs in introductory physics courses can influence their course outcomes and retention in STEM disciplines and future career aspirations. This study used survey data from 501 students in the first of two-semester algebra-based…
Students' difficulties in quantum mechanics may be the result of unproductive framing and not a fundamental inability to solve the problems or misconceptions about physics content. We observed groups of students solving quantum mechanics…
An analysis of barriers to women's participation in physics education is presented. It is expected that in undergraduate physics the most common situation for a women is that she is cisgender and one of a numerical minority in the…
When a ball hits a surface, does the angle of reflection always equal the angle of incidence? Not at all! Depending on the interplay of the ball's spin and speed and the force of friction, the ball's behavior after the bounce may differ…
Physics education researchers have argued that authentic physics education includes computation as part of a physics student's training, and many parties have made efforts towards this goal. However, most research on this teaching modality…
We analyze the effectiveness of working in pairs on the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism test in a calculus-based introductory physics course. Students who collaborated with a peer showed significantly larger normalized gain…
Friction is ubiquitous in daily life, from nanoscale machines to large engineering components. By probing the intricate interplay between system parameters and frictional behavior, scientists seek to unveil the underlying mechanisms that…
A recent paper by Salehi et al. claims that the differences found between major demographic groups on scores in introductory college physics tests are due to differences in pre-college preparation. No evidence is produced, however, to show…
Effective physics learning, especially in complex topics, requires balancing mathematical formalism with conceptual understanding. Conceptual problem-solving involves connecting math to physical reality, and using an epistemological…
Research suggests that students often have difficulty transferring their learning from one context to another. We examine upper-level undergraduate and graduate students' facility with questions about the interference pattern in the…
The friction force, friction coefficients and the effects on the dynamics of particles, bodies and systems, are fundamental themes in university physics of the first cycles and also in general physics courses of upper secondary education in…
The experience transfer students encounter as they navigate their journeys from community college to university is similar to that of buying a used car. We demonstrate this by showing how the information asymmetry in the market for used…
Very little is known about how the nature of expertise in introductory and advanced courses compares in knowledge-rich domains such as physics. We develop a framework to compare the similarities and differences between learning and patterns…
Transfer learning is a machine learning paradigm where the knowledge from one task is utilized to resolve the problem in a related task. On the one hand, it is conceivable that knowledge from one task could be useful for solving a related…
Sliding friction is usually introduced in high school, but rarely through activities in laboratory. A qualitative introduction to friction is presented by proposing exploration of different kind of materials in order to suggest which…
Despite the recognition that reflection is an essential part of problem solving, it is often not emphasized in upper-division physics courses. In this paper, we discuss homework corrections (HWCs) as a pedagogical tool to motivate…