Related papers: Mathematical Sensemaking as Seeking Coherence betw…
Physics lab courses are an essential part of the physics undergraduate curriculum. Learning goals for these classes often include the ability to interpret measurements and uncertainties. The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) is an…
Developing expert-like problem-solving skills is a central goal of undergraduate physics education. In this study, we investigate the impact of teaching explicit problem-solving frameworks, combined with deliberate practice, on students'…
Curriculum learning--ordering training examples in a sequence to aid machine learning--takes inspiration from human learning, but has not gained widespread acceptance. Static strategies for scoring item difficulty rely on indirect proxy…
Symbolic Computation and Satisfiability Checking are two research areas, both having their individual scientific focus but sharing also common interests in the development, implementation and application of decision procedures for…
Traditional problem-based exams are not efficient instruments for assessing the "structure" of physics students' conceptual knowledge or for providing diagnostically detailed feedback to students and teachers. We present the Free Term Entry…
This study examines the adaptation of the problem-solving studio to computer science education by combining it with pair programming. Pair programming is a software engineering practice in industry, but has seen mixed results in the…
To advance the evaluation of multimodal math reasoning in large multimodal models (LMMs), this paper introduces a novel benchmark, MM-MATH. MM-MATH consists of 5,929 open-ended middle school math problems with visual contexts, with…
Developing and making sense of quantitative models is a core practice of physics. Covariational reasoning -- considering how the changes in one quantity affect changes in another, related quantity -- is an essential part of modeling…
Teachers face growing pressure to integrate AI tools into their classrooms, yet are rarely positioned as agentic decision-makers in this process. Understanding the criteria teachers use to evaluate AI tools, and the conditions that support…
Reliable and validated assessments of introductory physics have been instrumental in driving curricular and pedagogical reforms that lead to improved student learning. As part of an effort to systematically improve our sophomore-level…
Text embeddings have become central to computational social science and psychology, enabling scalable measurement of meaning and mixed-method inference. Yet most representation learning is optimized and evaluated for prediction and…
This paper proposes critical pragmatism as a philosophy of sustainable mathematics education to bridge the gap between critical theory and the existing patchwork implementations. Combining existential sustainability as a holistic concept…
A goal of PER is to understand how students use math in physics contexts. To investigate how students use math, we need to identify transitions between conceptual sense-making about physical systems and using mathematics to describe and to…
Artificial intelligence offers powerful new tools for scientific discovery, but the interaction paradigms required to effectively harness these systems remain underexplored. In this paper, we present findings from a formative user study…
Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and framing. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for…
New technologies, such as MOOCs, provide innovative methods to tackle new challenges in teaching and learning, such as globalization and changing contemporary culture and to remove the limits of conventional classrooms. However, they also…
Mathematical information is essential for technical work, but its creation, interpretation, and search are challenging. To help address these challenges, researchers have developed multimodal search engines and mathematical question…
With an investigation into how students in a physics Master of science program make sense of their whole first year study experience in one of the years following a programme reform, we try to offer insights and advice to consider when…
Identifying the relevant physics principles is a central component of problem solving. A major goal of most introductory physics courses is to help students discern the deep similarities between problems based upon the physics principles so…
Natural language processing (NLP) is rapidly developing for applications in educational assessment. In this paper, I describe an NLP-based procedure that can be used to support subject matter experts in establishing a crosswalk between item…