Related papers: Engaging students in conjecturing through homework…
Helping students become proficient problem-solvers is one of the primary goals of physics courses. In part 1 of this article, we summarized the vast research on problem-solving relevant for physics instruction, and here we discuss a…
Problem-based learning (PBL) is a constructivist learner-centered instructional approach based on the analysis, resolution and discussion of a given problem. It can be applied to any subject, indeed it is especially useful for the teaching…
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…
Statistical thinking partially depends upon an iterative process by which essential features of a problem setting are identified and mapped onto an abstract model or archetype, and then translated back into the context of the original…
It is a fact of our existence, that no matter where we are, we most often find ourselves either hearing, seeing, talking, or even engaged in design related activities. Despite this reality, the notion of 'design', and in particular…
This article presents the findings of a case study which introduced online quizzes as a form of assessment in pure mathematics. Rather than being designed as an assessment of learning, these quizzes were designed to be an assessment for…
The solving of scientific and practical application connected with conducting of satellite experiments and measurement demand analysis of geometric and physic conditions according to different kind of models. This is forced in connect of…
We study the problem of active learning with the added twist that the learner is assisted by a helpful teacher. We consider the following natural interaction protocol: At each round, the learner proposes a query asking for the label of an…
Modern students encounter big, messy data sets long before setting foot in our classrooms. Many of our students need to develop skills in exploratory data analysis and multivariate analysis techniques for their jobs after college, but these…
The most important problems for society are describable only in vague terms, dependent on subjective positions, and missing highly relevant data. This thesis is intended to revive and further develop the view that giving non-trivial,…
This paper introduces R2D3, an agent that makes efficient use of demonstrations to solve hard exploration problems in partially observable environments with highly variable initial conditions. We also introduce a suite of eight tasks that…
In this work, we reimagine classical probing to evaluate knowledge transfer from simple source to more complex target tasks. Instead of probing frozen representations from a complex source task on diverse simple target probing tasks (as…
The objective of many real-world tasks is complex and difficult to procedurally specify. This makes it necessary to use reward or imitation learning algorithms to infer a reward or policy directly from human data. Existing benchmarks for…
Troubleshooting systems is integral to experimental physics in both research and instructional laboratory settings. The recently adopted AAPT Lab Guidelines identify troubleshooting as an important learning outcome of the undergraduate…
Randomized A/B comparisons of alternative pedagogical strategies or other course improvements could provide useful empirical evidence for instructor decision-making. However, traditional experiments do not provide a straightforward pathway…
In the words of the esteemed mathematician Paul Erd\"os, the mathematician's task is to \emph{prove and conjecture}. These two processes form the bedrock of all mathematical endeavours, and in the recent years, the mathematical community…
Machine learning can greatly benefit from providing learning algorithms with pairs of contrastive training examples -- typically pairs of instances that differ only slightly, yet have different class labels. Intuitively, the difference in…
End-of-course assessments play important roles in the ongoing attempt to improve instruction in physics courses. Comparison of students' performance on assessments before and after instruction gives a measure of student learning. In…
Exploration has been a crucial part of reinforcement learning, yet several important questions concerning exploration efficiency are still not answered satisfactorily by existing analytical frameworks. These questions include exploration…
This course, intended for undergraduates familiar with elementary calculus and linear algebra, introduces the extension of differential calculus to functions on more general vector spaces, such as functions that take as input a matrix and…