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Quantum mechanics can seem like a departure from everyday experience of the physical world, but constructivist theories assert that learners build new ideas from their existing ones. To explore how students can navigate this tension, we…
The large number of published articles in physics journals under the title "Comments on ..." and "Reply to ..." is indicative that the conceptual understanding of physical phenomena is very elusive and hard to grasp even to experts, but it…
Peer grading systems make large courses more scalable, provide students with faster and more detailed feedback, and help students to learn by thinking critically about the work of others. A key obstacle to the broader adoption of peer…
Acquiring the mathematical, conceptual, and problem-solving skills required in university-level physics courses is hard work, and the average student often lacks the knowledge and study skills they need to succeed in the introductory…
Homework in introductory physics represents an important part of a student's learning experience; therefore choosing the manner in which homework is presented merits investigation. We performed three rounds of clinical trials comparing the…
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…
Gaining recognition as a physics person by peers is an important contributor to undergraduate students' physics identity and their success in physics courses. Previous research has separately demonstrated that women perceive less…
Covariational reasoning -- reasoning about how changes in one quantity relate to changes in another quantity -- has been examined extensively in mathematics education research. Little research has been done, however, on covariational…
We investigate whether contemporary multimodal LLMs can assist with grading open-ended calculus at scale without eroding validity. In a large first-year exam, students' handwritten work was graded by GPT-5 against the same rubric used by…
Computer science class enrollments have rapidly risen in the past decade. With current class sizes, standard approaches to grading and providing personalized feedback are no longer possible and new techniques become both feasible and…
Providing individualized scaffolding for physics problem solving at scale remains an instructional challenge. We investigate (1) students' perceptions of a Socratic Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot's impact on problem-solving skills and…
This study examines how AI code assistants shape novice programmers experiences during a two-part exam in an introductory programming course. In the first part, students completed a programming task with access to AI support; in the second,…
Physics curricula across the US fail to prepare students adequately to solve problems, especially novel problems. A new curriculum, Matter and Interactions (M&I), was designed to improve student learning by organizing concepts around…
Several reports in education have called for transforming physics learning environments by promoting sensemaking of real-world scenarios in light of curricular ideas. Recent advancements in Generative-Artificial Intelligence has garnered…
Expert problem solvers are characterized by continuous evaluation of their progress towards a solution. One characteristic of expertise is self-diagnosis directed towards elaboration of the solvers' conceptual understanding, knowledge…
Researchers have pinpointed recognition from others as one of the most important dimensions of students' science and engineering identity. Studies, however, have found gender biases in students' recognition of their peers, with inconsistent…
In this work, I present an automatic system for the evaluation of closed-type exercises in physics at the high school level or in the first year of a degree where physics is a mandatory course. It is expected that this will allow students…
Making meaning with math in physics requires blending physical conceptual knowledge with mathematical symbology. Students in introductory physics classes often struggle with this, but it is an essential component of learning how to think…
Our main goal is to develop plans to increase physics enrollment. Once again we thoroughly analyze the problem from the beginning and reach the conclusion that the most appropriate starting point in this direction should be to look into…
Significant attention in the PER community has been paid to student cognition and reasoning processes in undergraduate quantum mechanics. Until recently, however, these same topics have remained largely unexplored in the context of emerging…