Related papers: Mathematical Sensemaking as Seeking Coherence betw…
The ability to express scientific concepts in mathematical terms and integrate scientific and mathematical reasoning about a phenomenon is a foundational cognitive process involved in scientific thinking. This process called blended…
Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
Blended mathematical sensemaking in science (blended MSS) involves deep conceptual understanding of quantitative relationships describing phenomena in science and has been studies in various disciplines. However, no unified characterization…
Current conceptions of expert problem solving depict physical/conceptual reasoning and formal mathematical reasoning as separate steps: a good problem solver first translates a physical Current conceptions of quantitative problem-solving…
University students taking introductory physics are generally successful executing mathematical procedures in context, but often struggle with the use of mathematical concepts for sense making. Physics instructors note that their students…
Many physics instructors aim to support student sensemaking in their classrooms. However, this can be challenging since instances of sensemaking tend to be short-lived, with students often defaulting to approaches based on answer-making or…
Blended mathematical sensemaking in science (MSS) involves deep conceptual understanding of quantitative relationships describing scientific phenomena. Previously we developed the cognitive framework describing proficiency in MSS across…
Developing expertise in physics requires appropriate integration and assimilation of physics and mathematics. Instructors and students often describe physics courses in terms of their emphasis on conceptual and quantitative problem-solving.…
Advances in machine learning (ML) offer new possibilities for science education research. We report on early progress in the design of an ML-based tool to analyze students' mechanistic sensemaking, working from a coding scheme that is…
Effective physics learning, especially in complex topics, requires balancing mathematical formalism with conceptual understanding. Conceptual problem-solving involves connecting math to physical reality, and using an epistemological…
Assessment tasks provide opportunities for students to make sense of novel contexts in light of their existing ideas. Consequently, investigations in physics education research have extensively developed and analyzed assessments that…
Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students'…
Introductory physics instruction emphasizes fluency with routine problem-solving procedures. However, even when applying these procedures, students frequently encounter challenges. This paper investigates how students navigate such moments…
The Mathematization project investigates students' use of mathematical tools across the undergraduate physics curriculum. As a part of this project, we look at intermediate mechanics students' written homework solutions to understand how…
During the last decade we have witnessed an impressive development in so-called interpreted languages and computational environments such as Maple, Mathematica, IDL, Matlab etc. Problems which until recently were typically solved on…
Scientific research involves mathematical modelling in the context of an interactive balance between theory, experiment and computation. However, computational methods and tools are still far from being appropriately integrated in the high…
ELOQUENT is a set of shared tasks that aims to create easily testable high-level criteria for evaluating generative language models. Sensemaking is one such shared task. In Sensemaking, we try to assess how well generative models ``make…
This article investigates the sensemaking demonstrated in 6th grade students' written responses to a single question free response final exam for physics asking them to recount everything they learned over the course of the academic year.…
This work examines student meaning-making in undergraduate physics problem-solving. We use a social semiotic perspective to sketch a theoretical framework. The social semiotic approach focuses on all types of meaning-making practices that…