Related papers: Combining surveys and sensors to explore student b…
We compute nodal centrality measures on the collaboration networks of students enrolled in three upper-division physics courses, usually taken sequentially, at the Colorado School of Mines. These are complex networks in which links between…
Education is a goal-oriented field. But if we want to treat education scientifically so we can accumulate, evaluate, and refine what we learn, then we must develop a theoretical framework that is strongly rooted in objective observations…
Social media allow for an unprecedented amount of interaction between people online. A fundamental aspect of human social behavior, however, is the tendency of people to associate themselves with like-minded individuals, forming homogeneous…
An increasing number of studies in physics education research use social network analysis to quantify interactions among students. These studies typically gather data through online surveys using one of two different survey formats:…
For several decades, scholars have studied cooperation and its outcomes in the educational context. Yet, we lack a complete understanding of how different instructional strategies impact the relationship between cooperation and learning.…
Over the past 15 years, the volume, richness and quality of data collected from the combined social networking platforms has increased beyond all expectation, providing researchers from a variety of disciplines to use it in their research.…
This paper presents a social network analysis of the professional support networks of 100 LGBTQ+ and/or women PhD physicists, comparing the networks based on the career sectors of academia, industry, and government/nonprofit. The methods…
Spreading dynamics and complex contagion processes on networks are important mechanisms underlying the emergence of critical transitions, tipping points and other nonlinear phenomena in complex human and natural systems. Increasing amounts…
We investigate the dynamics of student behaviors (posture, gesture, vocal register, visual focus) and the substance of their reasoning during collaborative work on inquiry-based physics tutorials. Scherr has characterized student activity…
Learning behavior of simple perceptrons is analyzed for a teacher-student scenario in which output labels are provided by a teacher network for a set of possibly correlated input patterns, and such that teacher and student networks are of…
We use the theories of identity statuses and communities of practice to describe three different case studies of students finding their paths through undergraduate physics and developing a physics subject-specific identity. Each case study…
The vast majority of research involving active learning pedagogies uses passive lecture methods as a baseline. We propose to move beyond such comparisons to understand the mechanisms that make different active learning styles unique. Here,…
Social network analysis (SNA) has been gaining traction as a technique for quantitatively studying student collaboration. We analyze networks, constructed from student self-reports of collaboration on homework assignments, in two courses…
Seating location in the classroom can affect student engagement, attention and academic performance by providing better visibility, improved movement, and participation in discussions. Existing studies typically explore how traditional…
This paper describes the development of a new university physics course designed to integrate physics, education, research, and community partnerships. The coordinated system of activities links the new course to local community efforts in…
Despite nation efforts to promote diversity and inclusion, women and gender minorities remain underrepresented in physics. One common approach to studying gender in physics contexts treats gender as a categorical identity variable (e.g.…
This article is on collective phenomena in pedestrian dynamics during the assembling and dispersal phases of gatherings. To date pedestrian dynamics have been primarily studied in the natural and engineering sciences. Pedestrians are…
We study the structure of personal relationships among 1068 high school students using a dataset that contains the network of self-reported friendly and conflictive relationships, with information on their directionality and intensity. We…
Through in-class observations of teaching assistants (TAs) and students in the lab sections of a large introductory physics course, we study which TA behaviors can be used to predict student engagement and, in turn, how this engagement…
We present a method to study engagement level uniformity in a class of students. We validate our method by comparing two semesters taught using different methods in a physics and mathematics course. The first semester used conventional…