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Quantum mechanics can seem like a departure from everyday experience of the physical world, but constructivist theories assert that learners build new ideas from their existing ones. To explore how students can navigate this tension, we…
The objectives of physics laboratory courses include fostering conceptual understanding and development of several important cognitive, psycho-motor, attitudinal and affective abilities. In most of the Indian colleges and universities (and…
We report on our study of student understanding of the physics of mechanical waves, specifically the propagation and superposition of simple wavepulses traveling on long, taut strings. We introduce the terms "particle pulses mental model"…
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…
Even if students can make the blend, interpret physics correctly in mathematical symbology and graphs, they still need to be able to apply that knowledge in productive and coherent ways. As instructors, we can show our solutions to complex…
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…
Aspects of quantum physics are no longer confined to the upper years of a physics degree. Concepts like superposition or entanglement that were once reserved for second- or third-year undergraduate courses now deserve attention earlier in a…
[Taken from the "README" in the book] My goal with this book is to provide some kind of bridge for mathematics between the high-school-level and college-level for physics students. From my perspective, our job as physicists is to observe…
It is well-known that introductory physics students often have alternative conceptions that are inconsistent with established physical principles and concepts. Invoking alternative conceptions in quantitative problem-solving process can…
Although an important goal of introductory physics labs is to train students in scientific reasoning and critical thinking, currently there are no standard tests in physics designed to assess such skills. We are in the process of developing…
A classroom activity for high school physics students is presented to explore the distinction between correlation and causation. Using data linking ice cream sales to drowning deaths, presented within a fictional news article, students…
Physics faculty care about their students learning physics content. In addition, they usually hope that their students will learn some deeper lessons about thinking critically and scientifically. They hope that as a result of taking a…
A quantum circuit is a computational unit that transforms an input quantum state to an output one. A natural way to reason about its behavior is to compute explicitly the unitary matrix implemented by it. However, when the number of qubits…
The perspectives of introductory classical physics students can often negatively influence how those students later interpret quantum phenomena when taking an introductory course in modern physics. A detailed exploration of student…
Understanding how physicists solve problems can guide the development of methods that help students learn and improve at solving complex problems. Leveraging the framework of cognitive task analysis, we conducted semi-structured interviews…
Asking questions during class time is one form of participation not commonly employed by members of underrepresented groups in large enrollment college classrooms, even though the form of participation is highly conducive to student…
First-order logic is typically presented as the study of deduction in a setting with elementary quantification. In this paper, we take another vantage point and conceptualize first-order logic as a linear space that encodes "plausibility".…
Analogy is a central faculty of human intelligence, enabling abstract patterns discovered in one domain to be applied to another. Despite its central role in cognition, the mechanisms by which Transformers acquire and implement analogical…
The traditional pedagogical paradigm in physics is based on a deductive approach. However, with the recent advances in information technology, we are facing a dramatic increase in the amount of readily available information; hence, the…
Proof search has been used to specify a wide range of computation systems. In order to build a framework for reasoning about such specifications, we make use of a sequent calculus involving induction and co-induction. These proof principles…