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Constraint inference is widely considered essential to align reinforcement learning agents with safety boundaries and operational guidelines by observing expert demonstrations. However, existing approaches typically assume homogeneous…
The Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) is a multiple-choice survey that contains a variety of electricity and magnetism concepts from Coulomb's law to Faraday's law at the level of introductory physics used to help inform…
Research on the test structure of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has largely been performed with exploratory methods such as factor analysis and cluster analysis. Multi-Dimensional Item Response Theory (MIRT) provides an alternative to…
Many prior studies have found a gender gap between male and female students' performance on conceptual assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) with male students…
Introductory physics labs can be designed and studied using the Communities of Practice framework, where a group of members pursues a common set of goals by learning and implementing a set of practices. Studies of student preferences and…
We present EDGE, a general-purpose, misconception-aware adaptive learning framework composed of four stages: Evaluate (ability and state estimation), Diagnose (posterior infer-ence of misconceptions), Generate (counterfactual item…
Analyzing students' written solutions to physics questions is a major area in PER. However, gauging student understanding in college courses is bottlenecked by large class sizes, which limits assessments to a multiple-choice (MC) format for…
A large body of research shows that using interactive engagement pedagogy in the introductory physics classroom consistently results in significant student learning gains; however, with a few exceptions, those learning gains tend not to be…
Students often begin physics courses with misconceptions rooted in everyday experience and intuition, which can be resistant to change. While research has identified strategies for addressing misconceptions across physics, it remains…
This study investigates differences in student responses to in-class and online administrations of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM), and the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science…
Developing a sense of community among students is one of the three pillars of an overall reform effort to increase participation in physics, and the sciences more broadly, at Florida International University. The emergence of a research and…
Community detection plays a crucial role in understanding the structural organization of complex networks. Previous methods, particularly those from statistical physics, primarily focus on the analysis of mesoscopic network structures and…
A partially unusual behaviour was found among 14 sophomore students of civil engineering who took a pre test for a free fall laboratory session, in the context of a general mechanics course. An analysis contemplating mathematics models and…
An important, yet largely unstudied, problem in student data analysis is to detect misconceptions from students' responses to open-response questions. Misconception detection enables instructors to deliver more targeted feedback on the…
We consider the problem of learning causal structures in sparse high-dimensional settings that may be subject to the presence of (potentially many) unmeasured confounders, as well as selection bias. Based on the structure found in common…
The Maryland Physics Expectations Survey (MPEX) describes student attitudes and expectations toward learning, and might be used to predict normalized gains on tests such as the Force and Motion Concept Evaluation (FMCE). These predictions…
Instruction is unlikely to be effective if instructors do not know the common alternate conceptions of introductory physics students and explicitly take into account common student difficulties in their instructional design. Here, we…
Physics curricula across the US fail to prepare students adequately to solve problems, especially novel problems. A new curriculum, Matter and Interactions (M&I), was designed to improve student learning by organizing concepts around…
We present results of a combined study from three UK universities where we investigate the existence and persistence of a performance gender gap in conceptual understanding of Newtonian mechanics. Using the Force Concept Inventory, we find…
Performing inference on data obtained through observational studies is becoming extremely relevant due to the widespread availability of data in fields such as healthcare, education, retail, etc. Furthermore, this data is accrued from…