Related papers: A cross-context look at upper-division student dif…
Development of conceptual multiple-choice tests related to a particular physics topic is important for designing research-based learning tools to reduce the difficulties. We explore the difficulties that the advanced undergraduate and…
Compared with introductory physics, relatively little is known about the development of expertise in advanced physics courses, especially in the case of quantum mechanics. Here, we describe a framework for understanding the patterns of…
We discuss an investigation exploring students' difficulties with equations involving resistance, capacitance and inductance. We find that introductory physics students have great difficulty understanding, e.g., how the resistance of an…
This paper identifies the challenges associated with coordinating the development of new research methodologies and an accelerated pace of new discoveries in materials science with slower-evolving textbooks and curricula. The target…
Parallel and Distributed Computing (PDC) is a critical yet conceptually challenging area of the undergraduate computer science curriculum. While students often encounter these concepts in theory, few gain exposure to experience in real…
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…
We discuss the clusters of resources that emerge when upper-division students write about electromagnetic fields in linear materials. The data analyzed for this paper comes from students' written tests in an upper-division electricity and…
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…
We investigate students' sense of ownership of multiweek final projects in an upper-division optics lab course. Using a multiple case study approach, we describe three student projects in detail. Within-case analyses focused on identifying…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
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…
Semi-supervised learning has emerged as an appealing strategy to train deep models with limited supervision. Most prior literature under this learning paradigm resorts to dual-based architectures, typically composed of a teacher-student…
Computational physics is a key part of what it means to do physics in the twenty-first century. However, upper division computational physics remains a largely understudied area. We set out to understand the experiences of students in an…
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…
At the start of the higher education curriculum, the conceptualization of local approximation objects of a function requires the articulation of knowledge and skills from Functional Analysis and Topology. In the study of functions, a number…
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…
In-context learning (ICL) has proven highly effective across diverse large language model (LLM) tasks. However, its potential for enhancing tasks that demand step-by-step logical deduction, such as mathematical reasoning, remains…
Very little is known about how the nature of expertise in introductory and advanced courses compares in knowledge-rich domains such as physics. We develop a framework to compare the similarities and differences between learning and patterns…
We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students'…
Incremental learning is nontrivial due to severe catastrophic forgetting. Although storing a small amount of data on old tasks during incremental learning is a feasible solution, current strategies still do not 1) adequately address the…