Related papers: Using math in physics -- Overview
We present our initial work to develop an assessment of calculus proficiency in the context of introductory physics (i.e., calculus transfer to physics), including a comparison of calculus transfer ability with physics self-efficacy and how…
The ability to emotionally or intellectually understand another person's thoughts and feelings-empathy-can foster critical connections that facilitate learning and collaboration. We present a case study of physics faculty that examines…
These Notes deal with various areas of mathematics, and seek reciprocal combinations, explore mutual relations, ranging from abstract objects to problems in physics.
During the last decade we have witnessed an impressive development in so-called interpreted languages and computational environments such as Maple, Mathematica, IDL, Matlab etc. Problems which until recently were typically solved on…
We give an overview of our philosophy of pictures in mathematics. We emphasize a bi-directional process between picture language and mathematical concepts: abstraction and simulation. This motivates a program to understand different…
Machine learning is poised as a very powerful tool that can drastically improve our ability to carry out scientific research. However, many issues need to be addressed before this becomes a reality. This article focuses on one particular…
Statistics is one of the most valuable of disciplines. Science is based on proof and it alone produces results, other approaches are not, and do not. Statistics is the only acceptable language of proof in science. Yet statistics is…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than contexts, is considered a hallmark of expertise in physics problem solving. With inspiration from a classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, we compared…
Philosophy of science attempts to describe all parts of the scientific process in a general way in order to facilitate the description, execution and improvements of this process. So far, all proposed philosophies have only covered existing…
We address the question "How do students make sense of Physics from the point of view of constituting physics knowledge?". A phenomenographic study is described as a result of which we present six qualitatively different ways in which…
Some relations between physics and finitary and infinitary mathematics are explored in the context of a many-minds interpretation of quantum theory. The analogy between mathematical ``existence'' and physical ``existence'' is considered…
Instructors in introductory physics courses often use labs and demonstrations to reinforce that the physics equations introduced in lectures and textbooks describe what actually happens in the real world. The surface features and…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress on advanced reasoning tasks such as mathematics and coding competitions. Meanwhile, physics, despite being both reasoning-intensive and essential to real-world understanding,…
Students entering engineering in universities of applied sciences were tested to see whether they understood easy Science problems within the first week of the first semester. The test comprised of mathematics and physics questions in both…
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…
Uncertainty is an important and fundamental concept in physics education. Students are often first exposed to uncertainty in introductory labs, expand their knowledge across lab courses, and then are introduced to quantum mechanical…
I provide a critical commentary regarding the attitude of the logician and the philosopher towards the physicist and physics. The commentary is intended to showcase how a general change in attitude towards making scientific inquiries can be…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
Covariational reasoning--considering how changes in one quantity affect another, related quantity--is a foundation of quantitative modeling in physics. Understanding quantitative models is a learning objective of introductory physics…
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…