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Laboratory courses are an important part of the undergraduate physics curriculum. During physics labs, students can engage in authentic, hands-on experimental practices, which can prepare them for graduate school, research laboratories, and…
In this paper, the use of cost-effective, custom home experiment kits for remote teaching of first-semester introductory physics labs is described. The kit experiments were designed to match the existing onsite lab experiment learning goals…
Teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for grading student solutions. Since grading communicates instructors' expectations, TAs' grading decisions play a crucial role in forming students' approaches to problem solving (PS) in…
Physics laboratory courses have been generally acknowledged as an important component of the undergraduate curriculum, particularly with respect to developing students' interest in, and understanding of, experimental physics. There are a…
Physics education research has consistently shown that students have higher learning outcomes when enrolled in active learning courses. However, while there is a lot of literature describing the difference between the two extremes of…
Interactive computational environments can help students explore algorithmic concepts through collaborative hands-on experimentation. However, static and instructor controlled demos in lectures limit engagement. Even when interactive…
While lab courses are an integral part of studying physics aiming at a huge variety of learning objectives, research has shown that typical lab courses do not reach all the desired goals. While diverse approaches by lab instructors and…
With the adoption of instructional laboratories (labs) that require students to make their own decisions, there is a need to better understand students' activities as they make sense of their data and decide how to proceed. In particular,…
A difficult challenge in physics education is to design professional development programs for teachers, which can lead to fundamental changes in their practise. We report all activities for physics teachers in the context of the National…
Although most teachers acknowledge the importance of taking investigative approached in students' science learning experiences, implementing them in high-school classes can be challenging for teachers. In this work, we analyzed data from…
When education researchers describe newly developed curricular materials, they typically concentrate on the research base behind their design, and the efficacy of the final products, but do not highlight the initial stages of creating the…
We redesigned an advanced physics laboratory course to include a project component. The intention was to address learning outcomes such as modeling, design of experiments, teamwork, and developing technical skills in using apparatus and…
Many institutions are changing the focus of their introductory physics labs from verifying physics content towards teaching students about the skills and nature of science. As instruction shifts, so too will the ways students approach and…
Existing approaches to active learning maximize the system performance by sampling unlabeled instances for annotation that yield the most efficient training. However, when active learning is integrated with an end-user application, this can…
Most, if not all, physics undergraduate degree programs include instructional lab experiences. Physics lab instructors, both faculty and staff, are instrumental to student learning in instructional physics labs. However, the faculty-staff…
Our recent study showed that two lab courses, whose goals were exclusively to reinforce material developed in the lecture courses, do not have any impact on exam performance at the 1% level. In this study, we replicated this analysis with a…
The usability of Reinforcement Learning is restricted by the large computation times it requires. Curriculum Reinforcement Learning speeds up learning by defining a helpful order in which an agent encounters tasks, i.e. from simple to hard.…
The increasing availability of digital tools for education offers significant opportunities to enhance teaching practices and student engagement. This study presents a structured categorization of online educational tools based on their…
Active Learning (AL) is a family of machine learning (ML) algorithms that predates the current era of artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional approaches that require labeled samples for training, AL iteratively selects unlabeled samples…
Teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for grading in introductory physics courses at large research universities. Their grading practices can shape students' approaches to problem solving and learning. Physics education research…