Related papers: Exploring student facility with "goes like'' reaso…
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.…
Students in introductory physics courses often rely on ineffective strategies, focusing on final answers rather than understanding underlying principles. Integrating scientific argumentation into problem-solving fosters critical thinking…
Physics students can encounter difficulties in physics problem solving as a result of failing to use knowledge that they have but do not perceive as relevant or appropriate. In previous work the authors have demonstrated that some of these…
With inspiration from the classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser [1], we asked introductory physics students in three introductory physics classes to categorize mechanics problems based upon similarity of solutions. To evaluate the…
The Principle of Relativity has so far been understood as the {\it covariance} of laws of Physics with respect to a general class of reference frame transformations. That relativity, however, has only been expressed with the help of {\it…
We describe an extracurricular learning path on waves focused on energy transfer. The advantages of introducing mechanical waves by using the Shive wave machine and laboratory activities are presented. Laboratories are realized by inquiry,…
As part of a larger study to understand instructors' considerations regarding the learning and teaching of problem solving in an introductory physics course, we investigated beliefs of first-year graduate teaching assistants (TAs) regarding…
We propose a unified approach to addition of some physical quantities (among which resistors and capacitors are the most well-known) that are usually encountered in introductory physics such that the formulae required to solve problems are…
The centuries-long practice of the teaching turned mechanics into an academic construct detached from its underlying science, the physics of macroscopic bodies. In particular, the regularities that delineate the scope of validity of…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
There is a substantial curricular overlap between calculus and physics, yet introductory physics students often struggle to connect the two. We introduce a quantity-based framing of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus (FTC) to help unify…
A goal of PER is to understand how students use math in physics contexts. To investigate how students use math, we need to identify transitions between conceptual sense-making about physical systems and using mathematics to describe and to…
Since Galileo and (more recently) D'Arcy Thompson, it has been understood that physical processes and constraints influence biological structures and their resulting functions. However these cross-discpline connections -- and their…
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'…
We introduce a new paradigm of learning for reasoning, understanding, and prediction, as well as the scaffolding network to implement this paradigm. The scaffolding network embodies an incremental learning approach that is formulated as a…
Computation is a central aspect of 21st century physics practice; it is used to model complicated systems, to simulate impossible experiments, and to analyze mountains of data. Physics departments and their faculty are increasingly…
A common learning goal for modern physics instructors is for students to recognize a difference between the experimental uncertainty of classical physics and the fundamental uncertainty of quantum mechanics. Our studies suggest this…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than surface features or contexts, is considered one of several proxy predictors of expertise in problem solving. With inspiration from the classic study by Chi,…
Measuring student learning is a complicated but necessary task for understanding the effectiveness of instruction and issues of equity in college STEM courses. Our investigation focused on the implications on claims about student learning…
Long chain-of-thought (CoT) trajectories provide rich supervision signals for distilling reasoning from teacher to student LLMs. However, both prior work and our experiments show that trajectories from stronger teachers do not necessarily…