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Prior research has raised concerns about students' over-reliance on large language models (LLMs) in higher education. This paper examines how Computer Science students and instructors engage with LLMs across five scenarios: "Writing",…
Student beliefs in introductory physics courses can influence their course outcomes and retention in STEM disciplines and future career aspirations. This study used survey data from 501 students in the first of two-semester algebra-based…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
In this investigation, we analyzed individual interviews with six female undergraduate physics majors at a large, public, research university in the US to understand their progression at different transition points to becoming physicists.…
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…
Undergraduate physics and astronomy students are expected to engage with scientific literature as they begin their research careers, but reading comprehension skills are rarely explicitly taught in major courses. We seek to determine the…
Boundary conditions (BCs) are considered as an important topic that advanced physics under- graduates are expected to understand and apply. We report findings from an investigation of student difficulties using boundary conditions (BCs) in…
Analyzing students' written solutions to physics questions is a major area in PER. However, gauging student understanding in college courses is bottlenecked by large class sizes, which limits assessments to a multiple-choice (MC) format for…
For this study, we compared the attitudes and beliefs about science of physical science (physics and mathematics) and life science (biochemistry and biology) students at the beginning of their university degrees using the CLASS (Colorado…
Diversity has an important, multifaceted role in the success of education. I have used a corpus analysis of the first ten years of Physical Review Physics Education Research to investigate the diversity, broadly defined, of physics…
Quantum Computing is an exciting field that draws from information theory, computer science, mathematics, and quantum physics to process information in fundamentally new ways. There is an ongoing race to develop practical quantum computers…
Most introductory quantum physics instructors would agree that transitioning students from classical to quantum thinking is an important learning goal, but may disagree on whether or how this can be accomplished. Although (and perhaps…
Student learning in upper division thermal physics has not been studied to the same extent as in other courses like electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. Studies addressing reasoning and learning at the graduate level are even more…
This study aimed at evaluating how students perceive the linguistic quality and scientific accuracy of ChatGPT responses to physics comprehension questions. A total of 102 first- and second-year physics students were confronted with three…
Learning physics is a context dependent process. I consider a broader interdisciplinary problem of where differences in understanding and reasoning arise. I suggest the long run effects a multiple choice based learning system as well as…
An analysis of barriers to women's participation in physics education is presented. It is expected that in undergraduate physics the most common situation for a women is that she is cisgender and one of a numerical minority in the…
Computation is intertwined with essentially all aspects of physics research and is invaluable for physicists' careers. Despite its disciplinary importance, integration of computation into physics education remains a challenge and, moreover,…
We examine the effect of misconceptions about friction on students' ability to solve problems and transfer from one context to another. We analyze written responses to paired isomorphic problems given to introductory physics students and…
This paper introduces a theory about the role of language in learning physics. The theory is developed in the context of physics students' and physicists' talking and writing about the subject of quantum mechanics. We found that physicists'…
Students face diverse pathways as they journey through undergraduate study. The analysis of student course records can untangle common patterns in course progression, and identify group trends in student outcomes. The current work examines…