Related papers: A modified peer instruction protocol: peer versus …
One of the most important active methodologies for physics learning developed in recent years is peer instruction. Its technique has allowed, among other things, to monitor students' conceptual learning. In this sense,…
Peer grading is the process of students reviewing each others' work, such as homework submissions, and has lately become a popular mechanism used in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Intrigued by this idea, we used it in a course on…
Extensive research has demonstrated that active learning methods are more effective than traditional lecturing at improving student conceptual understanding and reducing failure rates in undergraduate physics courses. Researchers have…
Pre-trained language models (PLMs) leverage chains-of-thought (CoT) to simulate human reasoning and inference processes, achieving proficient performance in multi-hop QA. However, a gap persists between PLMs' reasoning abilities and those…
Identifying the relevant physics principles is a central component of problem solving. A major goal of most introductory physics courses is to help students discern the deep similarities between problems based upon the physics principles so…
Engaging in meaningful collaborations with peers, both inside and outside the classroom, can greatly enhance students' understanding of physics and other STEM disciplines. We analyzed the characteristics of women and men who typically…
Programming instructors often conduct collaborative learning activities, such as Peer Instruction (PI), to enhance student motivation, engagement, and learning gains. However, the impact of group discussion and formation mechanisms on…
Students must learn effective problem solving strategies in order to develop expertise in physics. Effective problem solving strategies include a conceptual analysis of the problem followed by planning of the solution, and then…
Despite the precision and adaptiveness of generative AI (GAI)-powered feedback provided to students, existing practice and literature might ignore how usage patterns impact student learning. This study examines the heterogeneous effects of…
We propose a simple model to explore an educational phenomenon where the correct answer emerges from group discussion. We construct our model based on several plausible assumptions: (i) We tend to follow peers' opinions. However, if a…
Peer grading systems aggregate noisy reports from multiple students to approximate a true grade as closely as possible. Most current systems either take the mean or median of reported grades; others aim to estimate students' grading…
The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to…
Personalized question recommendation aims to guide individual students through questions to enhance their mastery of learning targets. Most previous methods model this task as a Markov Decision Process and use reinforcement learning to…
The authors use an action research (AR) approach in a collegiate studio physics class to investigate the power of partnerships via conferences as they relate to issues of establishing a student/mentor rapport, empowering students to reduce…
Instruction tuning commonly means finetuning a language model on instruction-response pairs. We discover two forms of adaptation (tuning) that are deficient compared to instruction tuning, yet still yield instruction following; we call this…
Personalized Intelligence (PI) is the problem of providing customized AI experiences tailored to each individual user. In many applications, PI is preferred or even required. Existing personalization approaches involve fine-tuning…
Modeling the creative mathematical sensemaking that characterizes expert thinking in physics is typically a struggle for new learners. To help students learn to reason this way, we created a set of supplemental activities called Physics…
Diffusion models for Text-to-Image (T2I) conditional generation have recently achieved tremendous success. Yet, aligning these models with user's intentions still involves a laborious trial-and-error process, and this challenging alignment…
Engaging students with well-designed clicker questions is one of the commonly used research-based instructional strategy in physics courses partly because it has a relatively low barrier to implementation [1]. Moreover, validated robust…
Recent works have shown that attaching prompts to the input is effective at conditioning Language Models (LM) to perform specific tasks. However, prompts are always included in the input text during inference, thus incurring substantial…