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Semi-supervised learning approaches train on small sets of labeled data along with large sets of unlabeled data. Self-training is a semi-supervised teacher-student approach that often suffers from the problem of "confirmation bias" that…
High-stakes exams play a large role in determining an introductory physics student's final grade. These exams have been shown to be inequitable, often to the detriment of students identifying with groups historically marginalized in…
We discuss a study to evaluate the extent to which free-response questions can be approximated by multiple-choice equivalents. Two carefully designed research-based multiple-choice questions were transformed into a free-response format and…
Quantum mechanics is a challenging subject, even for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Here, we discuss the development and evaluation of research-based concept tests for peer instruction as a formative assessment tool in…
A learning algorithm based on primary school teaching and learning is presented. The methodology is to continuously evaluate a student and to give them training on the examples for which they repeatedly fail, until, they can correctly…
There are countless reasons cited in scientific studies to explain the difficulties in programming learning. The reasons range from the subject's complexity, the ineffective teaching and study methods, to psychological aspects such as…
One attribute of experts is that they are likely to learn from their own mistakes. Experts are unlikely to make the same mistakes when asked to solve a problem a second time, especially if they had access to a correct solution. Here, we…
We investigate student understanding of energy and momentum concepts at the level of introductory physics by designing and administering a 25-item multiple choice test and conducting individual interviews. We find that most students have…
The goal of this paper is to investigate the connection between the performance gain that can be obtained by selftraining and the similarity between the corpora used in this approach. Self-training is a semi-supervised technique designed to…
The research presented in this thesis was motivated by the need to improve introductory physics courses. Introductory physics courses are generally the first courses in which students learn to create models to solve complex problems.…
Algorithmic recourse provides counterfactual action plans that help people overturn unfavorable AI decisions. While diverse recourse sets may improve transparency and motivation, they may also impose cognitive load and negative emotions by…
Reinforcement learning systems have the potential to enable continuous improvement in unstructured environments, leveraging data collected autonomously. However, in practice these systems require significant amounts of instrumentation or…
Human beings can leverage knowledge from relative tasks to improve learning on a primary task. Similarly, multi-task learning methods suggest using auxiliary tasks to enhance a neural network's performance on a specific primary task.…
Tiered assessment is a differentiated assessment strategy where students can choose to attempt advanced assessment tasks. We discuss the use of tiered assessment in second and third year electromagnetics courses.
Curriculum learning has been successfully used in reinforcement learning to accelerate the learning process, through knowledge transfer between tasks of increasing complexity. Critical tasks, in which suboptimal exploratory actions must be…
Academic lobification refers to a collection of academic performance control strategies, methods, and means that a student deliberately hides academic behaviors, or deliberately lowers academic performance, or deliberately delays academic…
Interleaved practice enhances the memory and problem-solving ability of students in undergraduate courses. We introduce a personalized learning tool built on a Large Language Model (LLM) that can provide immediate and personalized attention…
Adaptive experiments can increase the chance that current students obtain better outcomes from a field experiment of an instructional intervention. In such experiments, the probability of assigning students to conditions changes while more…
We describe an undergraduate course where physics students are asked to conceive an outreach project of their own. The course alternates between the project conception and teachings about pedagogy and outreach, and ends in a public show. We…
In a first course to classical mechanics elementary physical processes like elastic two-body collisions, the mass-spring model, or the gravitational two-body problem are discussed in detail. The continuation to many-body systems, however,…