Related papers: Dynamics of students' epistemological framing in g…
This work is about making decisions by digital means. Funds should be distributed by the students of Heinrich-Heine-University. The proposals were made by the students themselves without further influence. For this purpose, dialog-based…
With the adoption of instructional laboratories (labs) that require students to make their own decisions, there is a need to better understand students' activities as they make sense of their data and decide how to proceed. In particular,…
The ability to emotionally or intellectually understand another person's thoughts and feelings-empathy-can foster critical connections that facilitate learning and collaboration. We present a case study of physics faculty that examines…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than contexts, is considered a hallmark of expertise in physics problem solving. With inspiration from a classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, we compared…
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…
It is well-known that introductory physics students often have alternative conceptions that are inconsistent with established physical principles and concepts. Invoking alternative conceptions in quantitative problem-solving process can…
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 Mathematization project investigates students' use of mathematical tools across the undergraduate physics curriculum. As a part of this project, we look at intermediate mechanics students' written homework solutions to understand how…
Troubleshooting systems is integral to experimental physics in both research and instructional laboratory settings. The recently adopted AAPT Lab Guidelines identify troubleshooting as an important learning outcome of the undergraduate…
Visualization design is often described as the process of solving a well-defined problem by navigating a design space. While existing visualization design models have provided valuable structure and guidance, they tend to foreground…
Understanding the mechanisms of student sensemaking while navigating the physics problem-solving process can play an important role in developing approaches to helping students become proficient problem solvers. Since most prior studies on…
In this paper, we investigate deliberation procedures that invite citizens with contextual opinions to explore alternative thinking frames. Contextuality is captured in a simple quantum cognitive model. We show how disagreeing citizens…
In this companion paper, we explore the use of isomorphic problem pairs (IPPs) to assess introductory physics students' ability to solve and successfully transfer problem-solving knowledge from one context to another in mechanics. We call…
Students in physics laboratory courses, particularly at the upper division, are often expected to engage in troubleshooting. Although there are numerous ways in which students may proceed when diagnosing a problem, not all approaches are…
Helping students learn to think like a physicist is an important goal of many introductory physics courses. One characteristic distinguishing more experienced physicists from novice students is that they make better use of problem solving…
Symbolic equations are one of the many representations used in physics. Understanding these representations is important for students because they are how students access knowledge in physics. In this paper I build off of the work by Redish…
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…
Mathematics is an essential element of physics problem solving, but experts often fail to appreciate exactly how they use it. Math may be the language of science, but math-in-physics is a distinct dialect of that language. Physicists tend…
In this paper, we present a new task that investigates how people interact with and make judgments about towers of blocks. In Experiment~1, participants in the lab solved a series of problems in which they had to re-configure three blocks…
The evolution of science education is a dynamic process driven by advances in pedagogy, technology, and especially, our understanding of how students learn. Educators are exploring innovative teaching and learning methodologies such as…