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The current work aims to better understand student course experiences for those who reported negative perceptions in introductory physics. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 students who reported negative perceptions of their…
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…
The goal of this paper is to investigate the importance of providing visual "big pictures" in the teaching of economics. The plurality and variety of concepts, variables, diagrams, and models involved in economics can be a source of…
Professional development workshops are commonly used to promote the adoption of research-based instructional strategies among physics and astronomy faculty. After learning about such strategies, faculty are often motivated to modify and…
We are convinced of the usefulness of sketches and diagrams during mathematical work but the observation is made in our practices that they are not spontaneously used by students. In order to study the understanding and use of sketches by…
Recent work investigated the potential of comics to support the teaching and learning of programming concepts and suggested several ways $coding$ $strips$, a form of comic strip with its corresponding code, can be used. Building on this…
Textbooks in applied mathematics often use graphs to explain the meaning of formulae, even though their benefit is still not fully explored. To test processes underlying this assumed multimedia effect we collected performance scores, eye…
Helping students become proficient problem solvers is a major goal of many physics courses from introductory to advanced levels. In fact, physics has often been used by cognitive scientists to investigate the differences between the…
Presenting systems of differential equations in the form of diagrams has become common in certain parts of physics, especially electromagnetism and computational physics. In this work, we aim to put such use of diagrams on a firm…
Recent studies reveal that experienced data practitioners often draw sketches to facilitate communication around privacy design concepts. However, there is limited understanding of how we can help novice students develop such communication…
Students' learning orientation, as applied towards learning problem solving, may be differentiated into learning a problem solving framework for its own sake, learning for the sake of doing well in the course, and non-goal-related…
The Dirac delta function is a standard mathematical tool that appears repeatedly in the undergraduate physics curriculum in multiple topical areas including electrostatics, and quantum mechanics. While Dirac delta functions are often…
Computation is becoming an increasingly important part of physics education. However, there are currently few theories of learning that can be used to help explain and predict the unique challenges and affordances associated with…
Separation of variables can be a powerful technique for solving many of the partial differential equations that arise in physics contexts. Upper-division physics students encounter this technique in multiple topical areas including…
Interactive systems that facilitate exposure to examples can augment problem solving performance. However designers of such systems are often faced with many practical design decisions about how users will interact with examples, with…
This study examines how AI code assistants shape novice programmers experiences during a two-part exam in an introductory programming course. In the first part, students completed a programming task with access to AI support; in the second,…
We have analyzed the impact of taking an associated lab course on the scores on final exam questions in two large introductory physics courses. Approximately a third of the students who completed each course also took an accompanying…
In recent years there has been growing evidence that even after teaching designed to address the learning difficulties dictated by literature, many physics learners fail to create the proper reasoning chains that connect the fundamental…
We report on a large-scale study of student learning of quantum tunneling in 4 traditional and 4 transformed modern physics courses. In the transformed courses, which were designed to address student difficulties found in previous research,…
Educators frequently rely on diagrams to explain complex concepts during lectures, yet creating clear and complete visual representations in real time while simultaneously speaking can be cognitively demanding. Incomplete or unclear…