Related papers: Multiple choice homework as a cost-effective and e…
When deploying online homework in physics courses, an important consideration is how many attempts should be allowed in order to solve numerical free-response problems. While on the one hand, the maximum number of attempts should be large…
In this work, I present an automatic system for the evaluation of closed-type exercises in physics at the high school level or in the first year of a degree where physics is a mandatory course. It is expected that this will allow students…
Inequities in student access to trigonometry and calculus are often associated with racial and socioeconomic privilege, and often influence introductory physics course performance. To mitigate these disparities in student preparedness, we…
The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to…
Traditional high-stakes summative assessments--timed, in-class exams accounting for a large percentage of the term's overall grade--have often received criticism from the educational community. Such assessments tend to prize a particular…
Acquiring the mathematical, conceptual, and problem-solving skills required in university-level physics courses is hard work, and the average student often lacks the knowledge and study skills they need to succeed in the introductory…
This article quantitatively examines the effects that different incentives have on students' homework completion rates in introductory physics courses at the United States Air Force Academy. Our data suggest that no more than 10-15% of the…
Students who successfully engage in self-regulated learning, are able to plan their own studying, monitoring their progress and make any necessary adjustments based upon the data and feedback they gather. In order to promote this type of…
Despite the recognition that reflection is an essential part of problem solving, it is often not emphasized in upper-division physics courses. In this paper, we discuss homework corrections (HWCs) as a pedagogical tool to motivate…
A close look at students' written work on examinations offers a wealth of information about their performance, their knowledge of the subject, their strengths, weaknesses and misconceptions, and their overall level of mathematical skills…
We discuss first experiences with a new variant of self-assessment in higher mathematics education. In our setting, the students of the course have to mark a part of their homework assignments themselves and they receive the corresponding…
Feedback has a powerful influence on learning, but it is also expensive to provide. In large classes, it may even be impossible for instructors to provide individualized feedback. Peer assessment has received attention lately as a way of…
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…
We discuss a study to evaluate the extent to which free-response questions could be approximated by multiple-choice equivalents. Two carefully designed research-based multiple-choice questions were transformed into a free-response format…
The use of new technologies in higher education has surprisingly emphasized students' tendency to adopt a passive behavior in class. Participation and interaction of students are essential to improve academic results. This paper describes…
Assigning course grades to students requires obtaining accurate measures of the students' understanding and knowledge of the topic. The induced stress from a traditional summative assessment is known to negatively impact student grades,…
The shortage of people trained in STEM fields is becoming acute, and universities and colleges are straining to satisfy this demand. In the case of computer science, for instance, the number of US students taking introductory courses has…
An alternative to the dependence on traditional student loans may offer a viable relief from the tremendous burden that those loans usually incur. This article establishes that it is desirable for governmental intervention to grant students…
Peer grading systems work well only if users have incentives to grade truthfully. An example of non-truthful grading, that we observed in classrooms, consists in students assigning the maximum grade to all submissions. With a naive grading…
Intelligent Tutoring Systems often grant learners shared control over skill and problem selection. This choice brings motivational and metacognitive benefits. At the same time, past literature suggests that learners exhibit diverse…