Related papers: Case Study: Coordinating Among Multiple Semiotic R…
E-Semiotics is a conceptual and practical framework for designing, developing, and managing digital information and knowledge products. It applies semiotic principles to digital environments, focusing on the structural, contextual, and…
The ability to flexibly transform between different representations (e.g., from mathematical to graphical representations) of the same concept is a hallmark of expertise. Prior research suggests that many introductory physics students show…
Physical reasoning is a core aspect of intelligence in animals and humans. A central question is what model should be used as a basis for reasoning. Existing work considered models ranging from intuitive physics and physical simulators to…
Student modeling is central to many educational technologies as it enables predicting future learning outcomes and designing targeted instructional strategies. However, open-ended learning domains pose challenges for accurately modeling…
This paper proposes a novel semiotic framework for analyzing Large Language Models (LLMs), conceptualizing them as stochastic semiotic engines whose outputs demand active, asymmetric human interpretation. We formalize the trade-off between…
We present a computational model for the semantic interpretation of symmetry in naturalistic scenes. Key features include a human-centred representation, and a declarative, explainable interpretation model supporting deep semantic…
Advances in machine learning (ML) offer new possibilities for science education research. We report on early progress in the design of an ML-based tool to analyze students' mechanistic sensemaking, working from a coding scheme that is…
In this paper, we explore a multi-task semantic communication (SemCom) system for distributed sources, extending the existing focus on collaborative single-task execution. We build on the cooperative multi-task processing introduced in [1],…
In this paper, we present a new task that investigates how people interact with and make judgments about towers of blocks. In Experiment~1, participants in the lab solved a series of problems in which they had to re-configure three blocks…
The ability to emotionally or intellectually understand another person's thoughts and feelings-empathy-can foster critical connections that facilitate learning and collaboration. We present a case study of physics faculty that examines…
Representing the semantics of words is a long-standing problem for the natural language processing community. Most methods compute word semantics given their textual context in large corpora. More recently, researchers attempted to…
Too often, physics students are beset by feelings of failure and isolation rather than experiencing the creative joys of discovery that physics has to offer. This dissertation research was founded on the desire of a teacher to make physics…
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,…
Project-based learning improves student engagement and learning outcomes, yet allocating students to appropriately challenging projects while forming cognitively diverse teams remains difficult at scale. Traditional allocation methods…
Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and…
In this paper we present a unified framework for modeling multi-relational representations, scoring, and learning, and conduct an empirical study of several recent multi-relational embedding models under the framework. We investigate the…
This paper investigates the interactions between context and professional development of physics instructors in a case study of two physics faculty. A phenomenological-case study approach was used to analyze two physics faculty at different…
Mixed Reality (MR) is gaining prominence in manual task skill learning due to its in-situ, embodied, and immersive experience. To teach manual tasks, current methodologies break the task into hierarchies (tasks into subtasks) and visualize…
Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing education, with LLM-based agents playing a key role in simulating student behavior. A major challenge in student simulation is modeling the diverse learning patterns of students at various…
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…