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Physics education researchers have developed many evidence-based instructional strategies to enhance physics students' conceptual learning. These strategies have historically been tested using assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory…
The objective of physics laboratory training is to develop, in students, a variety of important cognitive and psycho-motor abilities related to experimental physics. These include conceptual understanding, procedural understanding,…
The inclusion of physical information in machine learning frameworks has revolutionized many application areas. This involves enhancing the learning process by incorporating physical constraints and adhering to physical laws. In this work…
In the U.S., introductory calculus-based courses often acts as a gatekeeper to STEM degrees. But access to the prerequisite math is far from equal--students from low-income and racially marginalized communities are far less likely to have…
Development of conceptual multiple-choice tests related to a particular physics topic is important for designing research-based learning tools to reduce the difficulties. We explore the difficulties that the advanced undergraduate and…
One hallmark of expertise in physics is the ability to translate between different representations of knowledge and use the representations that make the problem-solving process easier. In quantum mechanics, students learn about several…
The ability to make decisions based on data, with its inherent uncertainties and variability, is a complex and vital skill in the modern world. The need for such quantitative critical thinking occurs in many different contexts, and while it…
Learning quantum mechanics is challenging, even for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students. Interactive tutorials which build on students' prior knowledge can be useful tools to enhance student learning. We have been investigating…
Physics-informed machine learning (PIML) integrates prior physical information, often in the form of differential equation constraints, into the process of fitting machine learning models to physical data. Popular PIML approaches, including…
A goal of Introductory Physics for Life Sciences (IPLS) curricula is to prepare students to effectively use physical models and quantitative reasoning in biological and medical settings. To assess whether this goal is being met, we…
Developing critical thinking skills is a common goal of an undergraduate physics curriculum. How do students make sense of evidence and what do they do with it? In this study, we evaluated students' critical thinking behaviors through their…
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…
Physics lab courses are integral parts of an undergraduate physics education, and offer a variety of opportunities for learning. Many of these opportunities center around a common learning goal in introductory physics lab courses:…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) faces a fundamental challenge of extrapolation errors caused by out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. Implicit Q-Learning (IQL) employs expectile regression to achieve in-sample learning. Nevertheless, IQL…
Student learning in instructional physics labs represents a growing area of research that includes investigations of students' beliefs and expectations about the nature of experimental physics. To directly probe students' epistemologies…
We discuss an inquiry-based curriculum that has been developed specifically for the introductory algebra-based physics course, taking into account the needs, backgrounds, learning styles and career goals of the students in that class. The…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by educators and physics education researchers. Many of the items on the FCI have strong distractor choices…
Quantum Computing is an exciting field that draws from information theory, computer science, mathematics, and quantum physics to process information in fundamentally new ways. There is an ongoing race to develop practical quantum computers…
Performance in introductory courses, particularly physics, is often crucial for student success in STEM majors and can impact an individual's tendency to persist in their chosen field. To enhance students' individual learning experiences,…
We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students'…