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We describe how graduate students categorize introductory mechanics problems based on the similarity of their solutions. Graduate students were asked at the end of a teaching assistant training class to categorize problems from their own…
The paper describes two general problems encountered in computational assignments at the introductory level. First, novice students often treat computer code as almost magic incantations, and like novices in many fields, have trouble…
Since its inception, many physicists have seen in quantum mechanics the possibility, if not the necessity, of bringing cognitive aspects into the play, which were instead absent, or unnoticed, in the previous classical theories. In this…
Just as expert physicists vary in their personal stances on interpretation in quantum mechanics, instructors vary on whether and how to teach interpretations of quantum phenomena in introductory modern physics courses. In this paper, we…
The QuVis Quantum Mechanics Visualization project aims to address challenges of quantum mechanics instruction through the development of interactive simulations for the learning and teaching of quantum mechanics. In this article, we…
Students often begin physics courses with misconceptions rooted in everyday experience and intuition, which can be resistant to change. While research has identified strategies for addressing misconceptions across physics, it remains…
We present a conceptually clear introduction to quantum theory, deriving the theory from scratch from the point of view of quantum information. Different subsets of these lectures were taught to a wide variety of audiences, including…
We investigate student understanding of energy and momentum concepts at the level of introductory physics by designing and administering a 25-item multiple choice test and conducting individual interviews. We find that most students have…
The traditional pedagogical paradigm in physics is based on a deductive approach. However, with the recent advances in information technology, we are facing a dramatic increase in the amount of readily available information; hence, the…
The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a multiple-choice survey that contains a variety of electricity and magnetism concepts from Coulomb's law to Faraday's law at the level of introductory physics used to help inform…
The visual question generation (VQG) task aims to generate human-like questions from an image and potentially other side information (e.g. answer type). Previous works on VQG fall in two aspects: i) They suffer from one image to many…
Inequities in student access to trigonometry and calculus are often associated with racial and socioeconomic privilege, and often influence introductory physics course performance. To mitigate these disparities in student preparedness, we…
Designing a one-hour unit test for an introductory physics class can be quite challenging. We present an efficient format of a one-hour unit test that utilizes question groups for quantitative free-response problems and a binary system…
The training methods in AI do involve semantically distinct pairs of samples. However, their role typically is to enhance the between class separability. The actual notion of similarity is normally learned from semantically identical pairs.…
Physics makes powerful use of mathematics, yet the way this use is made is often poorly understood. Professionals closely integrate their mathematical symbology with physical meaning, resulting in a powerful and productive structure. But…
A goal of Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) curricula is to prepare students to effectively use physical models and quantitative reasoning in biological and medical settings. To assess whether this goal is being met, we…
We investigated the common difficulties that students have with concepts related to rotational and rolling motion covered in the introductory physics courses. We compared the performance of calculus- and algebra-based introductory physics…
One of the objectives of the undergraduate physics curriculum is for students to become aware of the connections between the fundamental principles of classical physics and their personal experience. Nonetheless, numerous studies have shown…
Upper-division physics students spend much of their time solving problems. In addition to their basic skills and background, their epistemic framing can form an important part of their ability to learn physics from these problems.…
Individual interviews are often considered to be the gold standard for researchers to understand how people think about phenomena. However, conducting and analyzing interviews is very time consuming. This paper presents the Group…