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An essential step in the process of developing a physics identity is the opportunity to engage in authentic physics practices - an ideal place to gain these experiences is physics laboratory courses. We are designing a practice-based…
Dropped into an unknown environment, what should an agent do to quickly learn about the environment and how to accomplish diverse tasks within it? We address this question within the goal-conditioned reinforcement learning paradigm, by…
Active learning (AL) is a subfield of machine learning (ML) in which a learning algorithm could achieve good accuracy with less training samples by interactively querying a user/oracle to label new data points. Pool-based AL is…
In real-world human-robot systems, it is essential for a robot to comprehend human objectives and respond accordingly while performing an extended series of motor actions. Although human objective alignment has recently emerged as a…
Education is a goal-oriented field. But if we want to treat education scientifically so we can accumulate, evaluate, and refine what we learn, then we must develop a theoretical framework that is strongly rooted in objective observations…
Classification algorithms aim to predict an unknown label (e.g., a quality class) for a new instance (e.g., a product). Therefore, training samples (instances and labels) are used to deduct classification hypotheses. Often, it is relatively…
In standard passive imitation learning, the goal is to learn a target policy by passively observing full execution trajectories of it. Unfortunately, generating such trajectories can require substantial expert effort and be impractical in…
This resource letter intends to provide physics instructors - particularly graduate student teaching assistants - at the introductory university level with a small but representative collection of resources to acquire a familiarity with…
We consider the problem of learning when obtaining the training labels is costly, which is usually tackled in the literature using active-learning techniques. These approaches provide strategies to choose the examples to label before or…
The paper describes a curricular framework for introducing microcontroller programming in the University Physics lab. The approach makes use of Modeling Instruction, an effective approach for teaching science at the secondary level in which…
Teaching scientific concepts is essential but challenging, and analogies help students connect new concepts to familiar ideas. Advancements in large language models (LLMs) enable generating analogies, yet their effectiveness in education…
We report a course on teaching in physics lab for teachers enrolled in Formative Active Training, which actually allows to obtain the teacher qualification in Italy. The course was designed with the purpose of showing in practice what means…
Research on nontraditional laboratory (lab) activities in physics shows that students often expect to verify predetermined results, as takes place in traditional activities. This understanding of what is taking place, or epistemic framing,…
In this paper we put forth a model for physics course reform that uniquely uses proven, research-based active learning strategies to help students improve their physics knowledge and problem-solving skills. In this study, we compared the…
Laboratory based courses play a critical role in scientific education. Automation is changing the nature of the laboratories, and there is a long running debate about the value of hands on versus simulated and remote laboratories. The…
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT are rapidly reshaping how students and instructors engage with course material -- and how they think about academic integrity. This paper presents a classroom activity designed to help physics students…
Despite the large body of research showing that students in STEM classes at all levels learn better via active learning than they do via lecture, post-secondary physics and astronomy (P&A) faculty members continue to primarily use…
Improving student success in introductory physics remains a persistent challenge despite substantial progress from research-based instructional practices. Evidence from the Latin American context remains limited, where resources for…
An active learner is given a hypothesis class, a large set of unlabeled examples and the ability to interactively query labels to an oracle of a subset of these examples; the goal of the learner is to learn a hypothesis in the class that…
In this paper, we describe how we transformed our large-enrollment introductory physics sequence for life-science students to a Lecture/Studio format and aligned the physics concepts with authentic biological applications. We have reformed…