Related papers: Analyzing student conceptual understanding of resi…
The research reported in this article represents a systematic, multi-year investigation of student understanding of the behavior of bipolar junction transistor circuits using a variety of different tasks to isolate and probe key aspects of…
Research has shown that both high school and university students' reasoning patterns regarding direct current resistive electric circuits often differ from the currently accepted explanations. At present, there are no standard diagnostic…
In computer science, students could benefit from more opportunities to learn important, high-level concepts and to improve their learning skills. Peer review is one method to encourage this by providing students with the opportunity to…
Conceptual inventory surveys are routinely used in education research to identify student learning needs and assess instructional practices. Students might not fully engage with these instruments because of the low stakes attached to them.…
We propose a general framework called Network Dissection for quantifying the interpretability of latent representations of CNNs by evaluating the alignment between individual hidden units and a set of semantic concepts. Given any CNN model,…
Computation is becoming an increasingly important part of physics education. However, there are currently few theories of learning that can be used to help explain and predict the unique challenges and affordances associated with…
Development of conceptual multiple-choice tests related to a particular physics topic is important for designing research-based learning tools to reduce the difficulties. We explore the difficulties that the advanced undergraduate and…
We discuss an investigation exploring students' difficulties with equations involving resistance, capacitance and inductance. We find that introductory physics students have great difficulty understanding, e.g., how the resistance of an…
We examine the difficulties that introductory physics students, undergraduate physics majors, and physics graduate students have with concepts related to conductors and insulators covered in introductory physics by giving written tests and…
Integrating computation into physics teaching is a curricular move that, at present, has been predominately studied for its cognitive impacts. However, if this modality of instruction shifts how students engage with physics, we argue there…
Binary program comprehension is critical for many use cases but is difficult, suffering from compounded uncertainty and lack of full automation. We seek methods to improve the effectiveness of the human-machine joint cognitive system…
Student learning in upper division thermal physics has not been studied to the same extent as in other courses like electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. Studies addressing reasoning and learning at the graduate level are even more…
Computational physics is a key part of what it means to do physics in the twenty-first century. However, upper division computational physics remains a largely understudied area. We set out to understand the experiences of students in an…
We describe a study focusing on students' and faculty members' reasoning about problems of differing cognitive complexity related to the double-slit experiment (DSE) with single particles. In the first phase of the study, students in…
We asked students to explain the structure and execution of their small programs after they had submitted them to a programming exercise. These questions about learner's code (QLCs) were delivered at three occasions in an online and open…
Concept inventories are standardized assessments that evaluate student understanding of key concepts within academic disciplines. While prevalent across STEM fields, their development lags for advanced computer science topics like dynamic…
Research-validated multiple-choice questions comprise an easy-to-implement instructional tool that serves to scaffold student learning and formatively assess students' knowledge. We present findings from the implementation, in consecutive…
We present a study of student understanding of energy in quantum mechanical tunneling and barrier penetration. This paper will focus on student responses to two questions that were part of a test given in class to two modern physics classes…
Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students' knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks (the "ConMap" tasks) was developed to probe the…
Previous research has shown that students often struggle to develop an understanding of linear and quadratic relationships. Covariational reasoning has been identified as a way to support this development. This study aims to investigate how…