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The study guide (textbook) is part of a set of materials designed to support high-quality practical training in physics. It includes a collection of tasks for organizing both in-class and independent work. The guide serves as a foundation…
Investigations related to expertise in problem solving and ability to transfer learning from one context to another are important for developing strategies to help students perform more expert-like tasks. Here we analyze written responses…
The use of automatic grading tools has become nearly ubiquitous in large undergraduate programming courses, and recent work has focused on improving the quality of automatically generated feedback. However, there is a relative lack of data…
Physics is considered as one of the most prevailing and problematic subjects by the students in the realm of science. Students perceived physics as a difficult subject during high school days and become more evasive when they reach college.…
This article quantitatively examines the effects that different incentives have on students' homework completion rates in introductory physics courses at the United States Air Force Academy. Our data suggest that no more than 10-15% of the…
Writing and argumentation are critical to both professional physics and physics education. However, the skill of making an extended argument in writing is often overlooked in physics classrooms, apart from certain practices like lab…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. One major focus while helping introductory physics students learn effective…
Commonly, introductory programming courses in higher education institutions have hundreds of participating students eager to learn to program. The manual effort for reviewing the submitted source code and for providing feedback can no…
The a priori analysis (APA) is discussed as a tool to assess the reliability of grades in standard curricular courses. This unusual, but striking application is presented when teaching the section on data treatment of a Laboratory Course to…
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…
When considering performing an Introductory Physics for Life Sciences course transformation for one's own institution, life science majors' achievement goals are a necessary consideration to ensure the pedagogical transformation will be…
One argument for keeping the physics GRE is that it can help applicants who might otherwise be missed in the admissions process stand out. In this work, we evaluate whether this claim is supported by physics graduate school admissions…
This project examines the prospect of using AI-generated feedback as suggestions to expedite and enhance human instructors' feedback provision. In particular, we focus on understanding the teaching assistants' perspectives on the quality of…
Student attitudes and approaches to problem solving can impact how well they learn physics. Prior research in the US using a validated Attitude and Approaches to Problem Solving (AAPS) survey suggests that there are major differences…
Generative AI has shown potential in solving physics problems and providing feedback on assessments. However, results are sometimes still inaccurate, at the wrong level, or using notations and definitions not appropriate for a particular…
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…
This article describes how the author successfully adapted techniques drawn from the literature on active learning for use in a graduate-level course on quantum field theory. Students completed readings and online questions ahead of each…
Students who serve as Learning Assistants (LAs) and have the opportunity to teach the content they are learning, while also studying effective teaching pedagogy, have demonstrated achievement gains in advanced content courses and positive…
We describe the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with quantum measurement within the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. We explore the possible origins of these difficulties by analyzing student…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…