Related papers: Beyond teaching methods: highlighting physics facu…
Conversational agents are increasingly used in education for learning support. An application is "learning by explaining", where learners explain their understanding to an agent. However, existing research focuses on single roles, leaving…
Collective human knowledge has clearly benefited from the fact that innovations by individuals are taught to others through communication. Similar to human social groups, agents in distributed learning systems would likely benefit from…
A long-term goal of reinforcement learning agents is to be able to perform tasks in complex real-world scenarios. The use of external information is one way of scaling agents to more complex problems. However, there is a general lack of…
Acquiring the mathematical, conceptual, and problem-solving skills required in university-level physics courses is hard work, and the average student often lacks the knowledge and study skills they need to succeed in the introductory…
Physicists and physics students have been studied with respect to the variation in ways they expound on their topic of research and a physics problem, respectively. A phenomenographic approach has been employed; six fourth-year physics…
One of the enduring challenges in education is how to empower students to take ownership of their learning by setting meaningful goals, tracking their progress, and adapting their strategies when faced with setbacks. Research has shown that…
Learning theories have historically changed when the conditions of learning evolved. Generative and agentic AI create a new condition by allowing learners to delegate explanation, writing, problem solving, and other cognitive work to…
The objective of this project is to compare the effectiveness of teaching styles used in high school physics classes and the methods used to assess them. We would like to determine those approaches to physics at the high schools that work…
The lack of diversity and the under-performance of underrepresented students in STEM courses have been the focus of researchers in the last decade. In particular, many hypotheses have been put forth for the reasons for the…
The last decade has seen an upswing in interest and adoption of reinforcement learning (RL) techniques, in large part due to its demonstrated capabilities at performing certain tasks at "super-human levels". This has incentivized the…
A hallmark property of explainable AI models is the ability to teach other agents, communicating knowledge of how to perform a task. While Large Language Models perform complex reasoning by generating explanations for their predictions, it…
The ability to construct, use, and revise models is a crucial experimental physics skill. Many existing frameworks describe modeling in science education at introductory levels. However, most have limited applicability to the context of…
The progressive introduction of the flip teaching (FT) instructional model into higher education has accelerated in recent years. The FT methodology seems to be especially suitable for laboratory practice sessions: before the lab session…
A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in…
Providing Reinforcement Learning agents with expert advice can dramatically improve various aspects of learning. Prior work has developed teaching protocols that enable agents to learn efficiently in complex environments; many of these…
The development of artificial intelligence systems is transitioning from creating static, task-specific models to dynamic, agent-based systems capable of performing well in a wide range of applications. We propose an Interactive Agent…
This study utilizes a sociocultural interpretation of Self-Determination Theory to better understand the role that learning contexts play in generating student motivation, engagement, and identity. By drawing on previous motivation research…
The role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education is undergoing a rapid transformation, moving beyond its historical function as an instructional tool towards a new potential as an active participant in the learning process. This shift…
This paper re-centres the discussion of student learning in physics to focus on context. In order to do so, a theoretically-motivated understanding of context is developed. Given a well-defined notion of context, data from a novel…
We discuss the development, implementation, and assessment of a course for science undergraduates designed to help them develop an awareness and a deeper appreciation of the intellectual demands of physics teaching. The course focused on…