Related papers: Online Administration of Research-Based Assessment…
Traditional high-stakes summative assessments--timed, in-class exams accounting for a large percentage of the term's overall grade--have often received criticism from the educational community. Such assessments tend to prize a particular…
The use of reinforcement learning (RL) in scientific applications, such as materials design and automated chemistry, is increasing. A major challenge, however, lies in fact that measuring the state of the system is often costly and time…
Item Response Theory becomes an increasingly important tool when analyzing ``Big Data'' gathered from online educational venues. However, the mechanism was originally developed in traditional exam settings, and several of its assumptions…
In many reinforcement learning (RL) applications one cannot easily let the agent act in the world; this is true for autonomous vehicles, healthcare applications, and even some recommender systems, to name a few examples. Offline RL provides…
While the positive outcomes of undergraduate research experiences (UREs) have been extensively categorized, the mechanisms for those outcomes are less understood. Through lightly structured focus group interviews, we have extracted the…
Automated answer grading is a critical challenge in educational technology, with the potential to streamline assessment processes, ensure grading consistency, and provide timely feedback to students. However, existing approaches are often…
Particle accelerators play a pivotal role in advancing scientific research, yet optimizing beamline configurations to maximize particle transmission remains a labor-intensive task requiring expert intervention. In this work, we introduce…
User studies are paramount for advancing science. However, researchers face several barriers when performing them despite the existence of supporting tools. In this work, we study how existing tools and their features cope with previously…
The goal of offline reinforcement learning is to learn a policy from a fixed dataset, without further interactions with the environment. This setting will be an increasingly more important paradigm for real-world applications of…
Reinforcement learning has emerged as one of the prominent topics attracting attention in modern statistical learning, with policy evaluation being a key component. Unlike the traditional machine learning literature on this topic, our work…
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic changed the landscape of education and led to increased usage of remote proctoring tools that are designed to monitor students when they take assessments outside the classroom. While prior work has…
The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey for Experimental Physics (E-CLASS) was developed as a broadly applicable assessment tool for undergraduate physics lab courses. At the beginning and end of the semester, the E-CLASS…
Rubric-based admissions are claimed to help make the graduate admissions process more equitable, possibly helping to address the historical and ongoing inequities in the U.S. physics graduate school admissions process that have often…
The objective of our study is to ascertain the present learning behaviors, driving forces, and assessment techniques as perceived by first-year students, and to examine them through the lens of the most recent developments (pandemic, shift…
This paper presents the design and refinement of automated Moodle-based Problem-Solving Assessments (PSAs) deployed across large-scale computing units. Developed to replace traditional exams, PSAs assess applied problem-solving skills…
Preference-based reinforcement learning (PBRL) in the offline setting has succeeded greatly in industrial applications such as chatbots. A two-step learning framework where one applies a reinforcement learning step after a reward modeling…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) presents distinct challenges as it relies solely on observational data. A central concern in this context is ensuring the safety of the learned policy by quantifying uncertainties associated with various…
This study investigates how faculty, student, and course features are linked to student outcomes in Learning Assistant (LA) supported courses. Over 4,500 students and 17 instructors from 13 LA Alliance member institutions participated in…
In response to national calls to better align physics laboratory courses with the way physicists engage in research, we have developed an epistemology and expectations survey to assess how students perceive the nature of physics experiments…
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the automation of rule-based routine processes to increase efficiency and to reduce costs. Due to the utmost importance of process automation in industry, RPA attracts increasing attention in the…