Related papers: Rethinking Tools for Training Teaching Assistants
Physics education research has consistently shown that students have higher learning outcomes when enrolled in interactive-engagement courses. Consequently, many schools are actively reforming their introductory curricula. For courses where…
Providing timely and personalized feedback to large numbers of students is a long-standing challenge in programming courses. Relying on human teaching assistants (TAs) has been extensively studied, revealing a number of potential…
Miscommunication and communication challenges between instructors and students represents one of the primary barriers to post-secondary learning. Students often avoid or miss opportunities to ask questions during office hours due to…
We discuss the categorization of 20 quantum mechanics problems by 6 physics professors and 22 undergraduate students from two honors-level quantum mechanics courses. Professors and students were asked to categorize the problems based upon…
The arrival of AI coding assistants in educational settings presents a paradigm shift, introducing a "new kid in the classroom" for both students and instructors. Thus, understanding the perceptions of these key actors about this new…
With recent advances in generative AI, conversational models like ChatGPT have become feasible candidates for TAs. We investigate the practicality of using generative AI as TAs in introductory programming education by examining novice…
Understanding issues involved in expertise in physics problem solving is important for helping students become good problem solvers. In part 1 of this article, we summarize the research on problem-solving relevant for physics education…
Recruiting and retaining highly qualified physics and physical science teachers is critical for maintaining America's global competitiveness. Unfortunately, only one third of the high school teachers in physics have a degree in physics and…
We study the problem of computer-assisted teaching with explanations. Conventional approaches for machine teaching typically only provide feedback at the instance level e.g., the category or label of the instance. However, it is intuitive…
We discuss the development, implementation, and assessment of a course for science undergraduates designed to help them develop an awareness and a deeper appreciation of the intellectual demands of physics teaching. The course focused on…
For the last four years, the School of Physics at Georgia Tech have been preparing new Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs) through a program that integrates pedagogy, physics content, and professional development strategies. Here we discuss…
The Test of Understanding Graphs in Kinematics (TUG-K) is a multiple choice test developed by Beichner in 1994 to assess students' understanding of kinematics graphs. Many of the items on the TUG-K have strong distractor choices which…
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…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
Teaching assistants (TAs) are essential to grading and feedback provision in proof-based courses, yet these tasks are time-intensive and difficult to scale. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have been studied for grading and feedback,…
Helping students become proficient problem solvers is a major goal of many physics courses from introductory to advanced levels. In fact, physics has often been used by cognitive scientists to investigate the differences between the…
Developing expertise in physics requires appropriate integration and assimilation of physics and mathematics. Instructors and students often describe physics courses in terms of their emphasis on conceptual and quantitative problem-solving.…
A considerable increase in enrollment numbers poses major challenges in course management, such as fragmented information sharing, inefficient meetings, and poor understanding of course activities among a large team of teaching assistants.…
A close look at students' written work on examinations offers a wealth of information about their performance, their knowledge of the subject, their strengths, weaknesses and misconceptions, and their overall level of mathematical skills…
Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know the common alternate conceptions of introductory physics students and explicitly take into account common student difficulties in their instructional design. Here, we…