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Many students in upper-division physics courses struggle with the mathematically sophisticated tools and techniques that are required for advanced physics content. We have developed an analytical framework to assist instructors and…
Knowledge tracing---where a machine models the knowledge of a student as they interact with coursework---is a well established problem in computer supported education. Though effectively modeling student knowledge would have high…
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…
We investigated physics students' learning experience and behaviour in a second-year laboratory by analyzing transcribed audio recordings of laboratory sessions. One student group was given both a problem and procedure and asked to analyze…
We describe a study in which introductory physics students engage in reflection with peers about problem solving. The recitations for an introductory physics course with 200 students were broken into the "Peer Reflection" (PR) group and the…
Several studies indicate that attracting students to research careers requires to engage them from early undergraduate years. Following this paradigm, our Engineering School has developed an undergraduate research program that allows…
This is a survey article on real algebra and geometry, and in particular on its recent applications in optimization and convexity. We first introduce basic notions and results from the classical theory. We then explain how these relate to…
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…
Project-based assessment, in the form of take-home exams, was trialed in an honours/masters level electromagnetic theory course. This assessment formed an integral part of the learning experience of the students, and students felt that this…
Designing suitable tasks for visualization evaluation remains challenging. Traditional evaluation techniques commonly rely on 'low-level' or 'open-ended' tasks to assess the efficacy of a proposed visualization, however, nontrivial…
Many undergraduate students of engineering and the exact sciences have difficulty with their mathematics courses due to insufficient proficiency in what we in this paper have termed clear thinking. We believe that this lack of proficiency…
The Explorations in Statistics Research workshop is a one-week NSF-funded summer program that introduces undergraduate students to current research problems in applied statistics. The goal of the workshop is to expose students to exciting,…
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…
In recent years we have explored using Haskell alongside a traditional mathematical formalism in our large-enrolment university course on topics including logic and formal languages, aiming to offer our students a programming perspective on…
It is commonly agreed that the success of future proof assistants will rely on their ability to incorporate computations within deduction in order to mimic the mathematician when replacing the proof of a proposition P by the proof of an…
Statistics educators recommend teaching with real data with relevant contexts, but defining relevancy is challenging and varies by student. We investigated whether providing student choice of data context increases engagement through a…
The authors have been using a largely algebraic form of ``computational discovery'' in various undergraduate classes at their respective institutions for some decades now to teach pure mathematics, applied mathematics, and computational…
In an educational setting, an estimate of the difficulty of multiple-choice questions (MCQs), a commonly used strategy to assess learning progress, constitutes very useful information for both teachers and students. Since human assessment…
Teaching an agent to perform new tasks using natural language can easily be hindered by ambiguities in interpretation. When a teacher provides an instruction to a learner about an object by referring to its features, the learner can…
Developing expert-like problem-solving skills is a central goal of undergraduate physics education. In this study, we investigate the impact of teaching explicit problem-solving frameworks, combined with deliberate practice, on students'…