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Group work is becoming increasingly common in introductory physics classrooms. Understanding how students engage in these group learning environments is important for designing and facilitating productive learning opportunities for…
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.…
Quantum mechanics is challenging even for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Dirac notation is a convenient notation used extensively in quantum mechanics. We have been investigating the difficulties that the advanced…
Hardware support for high-performance computing (HPC) has so far been subject to significant advances. The pervasiveness of HPC systems, mainly made up with parallel computing units, makes it crucial to spread and vivify effective HPC…
Students' difficulties in quantum mechanics may be the result of unproductive framing and not a fundamental inability to solve the problems or misconceptions about physics content. We observed groups of students solving quantum mechanics…
This proposal presents a methodology called enriched three-tier test, based on a similar test previously discussed in the literature. Ours consists of the use of justification and degrees of confidence combined with a multiple-choice test.…
Open-ended tasks, such as coding problems that are common in computer science education, provide detailed insights into student knowledge. However, training large language models (LLMs) to simulate and predict possible student errors in…
Incorporating computer programming exercises into introductory physics is a delicate task that involves a number of choices that may have an effect on student learning. We present a "hybrid" approach that speaks to a number of common…
An important goal of graduate physics core courses is to help students develop expertise in problem solving and improve their reasoning and meta-cognitive skills. We explore the conceptual difficulties of physics graduate students by…
Reinforcement learning (rl) is a popular paradigm for sequential decision making problems. The past decade's advances in rl have led to breakthroughs in many challenging domains such as video games, board games, robotics, and chip design.…
As the diversity of people in higher education grows, Universities are struggling to provide inclusive environments that nurture the spirit of free inquiry in the presence of these differences. At the extreme, the value of diversity is…
Previous research indicates that after standard instruction students at all academic levels often construct a conceptual framework in which the ideas of absolute simultaneity and the relativity of simultaneity co-exist. This article…
Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) is a task that aims to improve the recommendation performance in a target domain by leveraging the information from source domains. Contrastive learning methods have been widely adopted among intra-domain…
With the advent of high-level programming languages capable of quickly rendering three-dimensional simulations, the inclusion of computers as a learning tool in the classroom has become more prevalent. Although work has begun to study the…
We formulate a unifying framework for unsupervised continual learning (UCL), which disentangles learning objectives that are specific to the present and the past data, encompassing stability, plasticity, and cross-task consolidation. The…
This study presents a review of the current state of research on teaching quantum mechanics in secondary and lower undergraduate education. A conceptual approach to quantum mechanics is being implemented in more and more introductory…
Computer science education has evolved extensively; however, systemic barriers still prevent students with visual impairments from fully participating. While existing research has developed specialized programming tools and assistive…
Measurement uncertainty is an important topic in the undergraduate laboratory curriculum. Previous research on student thinking about experimental measurement uncertainty has focused primarily on introductory-level students' procedural…
Throughout introductory physics, students create and interpret free body diagrams in which multiple forces act on an object, typically at a single location (the object's center of mass). The situation increases in difficulty when multiple…
A major challenge in the Deep RL (DRL) community is to train agents able to generalize over unseen situations, which is often approached by training them on a diversity of tasks (or environments). A powerful method to foster diversity is to…