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Even though intelligent systems such as Siri or Google Assistant are enjoyable (and useful) dialog partners, users can only access predefined functionality. Enabling end-users to extend the functionality of intelligent systems will be the…
We discuss parallels between students and teachers in the process of pedagogical reform. Reform aims for students to develop their own process for becoming independent learners, and to gain personal ownership. Likewise teachers can develop…
Providing Reinforcement Learning agents with expert advice can dramatically improve various aspects of learning. Prior work has developed teaching protocols that enable agents to learn efficiently in complex environments; many of these…
Successful implementation of active learning strategies in the engineering classroom -- and in particular in certain subjects which are highly technological in nature such as, for instance, rocket engines and space propulsion -- means…
Physics lab courses are integral parts of an undergraduate physics education, and offer a variety of opportunities for learning. Many of these opportunities center around a common learning goal in introductory physics lab courses:…
Training reasoning language models (LMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) for one-hot correctness inherently relies on the LM being able to explore and solve its task with some chance at initialization. Furthermore, a key use case of…
When demonstrating a task, human tutors pedagogically modify their behavior by either "showing" the task rather than just "doing" it (exaggerating on relevant parts of the demonstration) or by giving demonstrations that best disambiguate…
The number of students with disabilities and specifically students with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) entering postsecondary STEM education has been increasing in recent decades. However, many instructors and popular…
Increasingly more research areas rely on machine learning methods to accelerate discovery while saving resources. Machine learning models, however, usually require large datasets of experimental or computational results, which in certain…
Evaluating different training interventions to determine which produce the best learning outcomes is one of the main challenges faced by instructional designers. Typically, these designers use A/B experiments to evaluate each intervention;…
Authentic research as a method of teaching science is gaining popularity in high schools and colleges. To make this research experience most efficient, students need adequate preparation in traditional science courses. Existing materials…
This report is a summary of two preparatory workshops, documenting the community vision for the national accelerator and beam physics research program. It identifies the Grand Challenges of accelerator and beam physics (ABP) field and…
Curriculum learning for training LLMs requires a difficulty signal that aligns with reasoning while remaining scalable and interpretable. We propose a simple premise: tasks that demand deeper depth of thought for humans should also be…
The use of validated conceptual assessments alongside more standard course exams has become standard practice for the introductory courses in many physics departments. These assessments provide a more standard measure of certain learning…
Optimal design for model training is a critical topic in machine learning. Active Learning aims at obtaining improved models by querying samples with maximum uncertainty according to the estimation model for artificially labeling; this has…
Active learning (AL) aims to enable training high performance classifiers with low annotation cost by predicting which subset of unlabelled instances would be most beneficial to label. The importance of AL has motivated extensive research,…
Laboratory courses are key components of most undergraduate physics programs. Lab courses often aim to achieve the following learning outcomes: developing students' experimental skills, engaging students in authentic scientific practices,…
The aim of this study is to investigate the decisions and reasoning of undergraduate students when choosing simple measurement instruments in an introductory physics laboratory course. For this study, we have developed a questionnaire and…
Projects and Practices in Physics (P$^3$) is an introductory physics class at Michigan State University that replaces lectures with a problem based learning environment. To promote the development of group based practices, students all…
Understanding how an instructional approach shapes student's cognitive resources and engagement is central to improving undergraduate physics education especially for novice learners. This study examines how three instructional modalities…