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The modern engineering landscape increasingly requires a range of skills to successfully integrate complex systems. Project-based learning is used to help students build professional skills. However, it is typically applied to small teams…
Cultural Astronomy is interdisciplinary connecting the arts, humanities, social & physical sciences. Data collection methods and theories are used from many disciplines and meld with methods and theories within cultural astronomy. The…
Throughout the processing and analysis of survey data, a ubiquitous issue nowadays is that we are spoilt for choice when we need to select a methodology for some of its steps. The alternative methods usually fail and excel in different data…
Peer learning is a novel high-level reinforcement learning framework for agents learning in groups. While standard reinforcement learning trains an individual agent in trial-and-error fashion, all on its own, peer learning addresses a…
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…
Field trips and the outdoor classroom are a vital part of many courses at school and FE/HE level. They apply previously obtained skills and knowledge in the field and further deeper learning. However, it would be desirable to teach the…
We describe the development of a junior-senior level course for Physics majors designed to teach Mathematica skills in support of their undergraduate coursework, but also to introduce students to modern research level results. Standard…
One of the most important active methodologies for physics learning developed in recent years is peer instruction. Its technique has allowed, among other things, to monitor students' conceptual learning. In this sense,…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
The widespread dissemination of machine learning tools in science, particularly in astronomy, has revealed the limitation of working with simple single-task scenarios in which any task in need of a predictive model is looked in isolation,…
In undergraduate research experiences, student development of an identity as a scientist is coupled to their sense of ownership of their research projects. As a a first step towards studying similar connections in physics laboratory…
In this paper we investigate the extent to which students' problem-solving behaviors change as a result of working on multi-faceted, context-rich problems. During the semester, groups of two to three students work on several problems that…
Observing celestial objects and advancing our scientific knowledge about them involves tedious planning, scheduling, data collection and data post-processing. Many of these operational aspects of astronomy are guided and executed by expert…
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…
The method of images (MoI) is a valuable technique for solving certain electrostatic boundary value problems consisting of charge density near conductor(s). We developed and validated an inquiry-based tutorial on MoI to help students learn…
If students are to successfully grapple with authentic, complex biological problems as scientists and citizens, they need practice solving such problems during their undergraduate years. Physics education researchers have investigated…
Investigations related to expertise in problem solving and ability to transfer learning from one context to another are important for developing strategies to help students perform more expert-like tasks. Here we analyze written responses…
Modern astronomy increasingly depends on computational thinking. Although some astronomy courses for undergraduates use computing, high school astronomy courses often have little computing. Created as a part of a research experience for…
We describe the difficulties that advanced undergraduate and graduate students have with quantum measurement within the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics. We explore the possible origins of these difficulties by analyzing student…
Parsons problems are a type of programming activity that present learners with blocks of existing code and requiring them to arrange those blocks to form a program rather than write the code from scratch. Micro Parsons problems extend this…