Related papers: Tiered Assessment in Upper-Level Undergraduate Phy…
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…
Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…
The Colorado Upper-division Electrostatics (CUE) diagnostic was designed as an open-ended assessment in order to capture elements of student reasoning in upper-division electrostatics. The diagnostic has been given for many semesters at…
In recent years, computing has become an important part of the way we teach and learn physics. Teachers, both at high school and college levels, now use computational activities in many of their courses. Physics departments are offering…
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…
Research-validated multiple-choice questions comprise an easy-to-implement instructional tool that serves to scaffold student learning and formatively assess students knowledge. We present findings from the implementation, in consecutive…
This article describes an undergraduate physics module at a university in England that places year 3 student physicists in secondary school classrooms for a semester. This is done as a way of introducing them to the occupation of secondary…
Dimensional analysis is a simple qualitative method for determining essential connections between physical quantities. It is applicable to a multitude of physics problems, many of which canbe introduced early on in a university physics…
Timescales spanning 24 orders of magnitude smaller than one second can be studied experimentally, and each range is packed with different physical phenomena. This rich range of timescales offers a great context for an innovative…
The objective of this project is to compare the effectiveness of teaching styles used in high school physics classes and the methods used to assess them. We would like to determine those approaches to physics at the high schools that work…
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…
This article deals with peer-assessment in the context of higher education teaching in mathematics, and examines the nature of student activity when assessing work produced by peers. After an overview of research on peer assessment, we…
The ability to categorize problems is a measure of expertise in a domain. In order to help students learn effectively, instructors and teaching assistants (TAs) should have pedagogical content knowledge. They must be aware of the prior…
The objective of physics laboratory training is to develop, in students, a variety of important cognitive and psycho-motor abilities related to experimental physics. These include conceptual understanding, procedural understanding,…
Oral exams were common historically across academia, though their popularity has recently fallen. Many argue against them as an assessment technique because they are vulnerable to bias and subjectivity, difficult to administer, and…
Student performance prediction is one of the most important subjects in educational data mining. As a modern technology, machine learning offers powerful capabilities in feature extraction and data modeling, providing essential support for…
The Georgia Tech blended introductory calculus-based mechanics course emphasizes scientific communication as one of its learning goals, and to that end, we gave our students a series of four peer-evaluation assignments intended to develop…
Thermodynamics could be seen as an expression of physics at a high epistemic level. As such, its potential as an inductive bias to help machine learning procedures attain accurate and credible predictions has been recently realized in many…
Although developing proficiency with modeling is a nationally endorsed learning outcome for upper-division undergraduate physics lab courses, no corresponding research-based assessments exist. Our longterm goal is to develop assessments of…
Feedback has a powerful influence on learning, but it is also expensive to provide. In large classes, it may even be impossible for instructors to provide individualized feedback. Peer assessment has received attention lately as a way of…