Related papers: Using lab notebooks to examine students' engagemen…
One of the key skills of a researcher is noticing what's going on. Both in the experiment one's performing and in one's data: is there something interesting, reason to doubt one's data or suspect that one's theoretical description is…
We have designed an introductory laboratory course that engaged first-year undergraduate students in two complementary types of iteration: (1) iterative improvement of experiments through cycles of modeling systems, designing experiments,…
To effectively prepare engineering students requires of formation of a system of fundamental physical knowledge together with the ability to apply them in specific productive activities, both on fundamental and on the profiled-oriented…
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…
Recently, the National Research Council's framework for next generation science standards highlighted "computational thinking" as one of its "fundamental practices". 9th Grade students taking a physics course that employed the Modeling…
We build on theoretical foundations of tool-mediated learning, tool design, and human computer interaction to develop a framework for implicit scaffolding in learning environments. Implicit scaffolding employs affordances, constraints,…
This study presents the design and the implementation of an inquiry-based reconstruction of Rutherford's gold foil experiment. The activity engaged students in collaborative exploration using a "black box" as an analogical model of the…
Group work is becoming increasingly common in introductory physics classrooms. Understanding how students engage in these group learning environments is important for designing and facilitating productive learning opportunities for…
Large language models (LLMs) benefit greatly from prompt engineering, with in-context learning standing as a pivital technique. While former approaches have provided various ways to construct the demonstrations used for in-context learning,…
In this paper we present a method of modeling and analysis that permits the extraction and quantitative display of detailed information about the effects of instruction on a class's knowledge. The method relies on a congitive model that…
A variety of activities are commonly used in college physics courses including lab, tutorials, and studio curricula. Instructors must choose among using research-based activities, designing their own activities or modifying existing…
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…
We present a method to study engagement level uniformity in a class of students. We validate our method by comparing two semesters taught using different methods in a physics and mathematics course. The first semester used conventional…
This second paper in a multi-part series builds on the first, which introduced the Ways of Thinking for Engineering Design-based Physics (WoT4EDP) framework for STEM education in an introductory undergraduate physics course. Here, we apply…
CONTRIBUTION: This paper presents an empirical study of an introductory-level programming course with students using multiple monitors and compares their performance and self-reported experiences versus students using a single monitor.…
Prior research has shown that physics students often think about experimental procedures and data analysis very differently from experts. One key framework for analyzing student thinking has found that student thinking is more point-like,…
Compared with introductory physics, relatively little is known about the development of expertise in advanced physics courses, especially in the case of quantum mechanics. Here, we describe a framework for understanding the patterns of…
At the University of Colorado Boulder, as part of our broader efforts to transform middle- and upper-division physics courses, we research students' difficulties with particular concepts, methods, and tools in classical mechanics,…
Undergraduate physics education has greatly benefited from the introduction of computational activities. However, despite the benefits computation has delivered, we still lack a complete understanding of the computationally integrated…
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…