Related papers: Development and validation of the Converging Lense…
Introductory physics lab instruction is undergoing a transformation, with increasing emphasis on developing experimentation and critical thinking skills. These changes present a need for standardized assessment instruments to determine the…
Concept inventories are standardized assessments that evaluate student understanding of key concepts within academic disciplines. While prevalent across STEM fields, their development lags for advanced computer science topics like dynamic…
Despite the significant amount of time undergraduate students spend in introductory physics labs, there is little consensus on instructional goals and accepted diagnostic assessments for these labs. In response to these issues, we have…
A key to effective teaching is an awareness and accurate understanding of the thinking and implicit assumptions that students bring to the subject to be learned. In the absence of extensive Socratic interactions with students, one strategy…
Reliable and validated assessments of introductory physics have been instrumental in driving curricular and pedagogical reforms that lead to improved student learning. As part of an effort to systematically improve our sophomore-level…
We have developed the Physics Inventory of Quantitative Literacy (PIQL) as a tool to measure students' quantitative literacy in the context of introductory physics topics. We present the results from various quantitative analyses used to…
We report on the status of our Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATS) project that is creating and validating a concept inventory for cybersecurity, which assesses the quality of instruction of any first course in cybersecurity. In fall…
Reliable and validated assessments of introductory physics have been instrumental in driving curricular and pedagogical reforms that lead to improved student learning. As part of an effort to systematically improve our sophomore-level…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) is a well-established physics education assessment tool used to evaluate students' comprehension of elementary mechanics principles. While it can be used to analyse the effectiveness of instruction if…
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…
Large-scale pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs), such as CLIP, establish the correlation between texts and images, achieving remarkable success on various downstream tasks with fine-tuning. In existing fine-tuning methods, the…
Light phenomena conceptual assessment (LPCA) is a conceptual survey of light phenomena that has been recently established by the physics education research (PER) scholars. Studying the LPCA psychometric properties is always imperative to…
What kind of problem-solving instruction can help students apply what they have learned to solve the new and unfamiliar problems they will encounter in the future? We propose that mathematical sensemaking, the practice of seeking coherence…
We reflect on our ongoing journey in the educational Cybersecurity Assessment Tools (CATS) Project to create two concept inventories for cybersecurity. We identify key steps in this journey and important questions we faced. We explain the…
Experimental activities are an essential part of physics education. In addition to conveying scientific knowledge, they play a significant role in developing scientific literacy, inquiry skills, and critical thinking. In today's world,…
One of the well-known challenges in computer vision tasks is the visual diversity of images, which could result in an agreement or disagreement between the learned knowledge and the visual content exhibited by the current observation. In…
Concave mirrors are fundamental optical elements, yet some easily observed behaviors are rarely addressed in standard textbooks, such as the formation of multiple reflected images. Here we investigate self-imaging -- where the observer is…
We report on progress towards the development of an Action Concept Inventory (ACI), a test that measures student understanding of action principles in introductory mechanics and optics. The ACI also covers key concepts of many-paths quantum…
This paper presents the first item response theory (IRT) analysis of the national data set on introductory, general education, college-level astronomy teaching using the Light and Spectroscopy Concept Inventory (LSCI). We used the…
Assessing student learning is a cornerstone of educational practice. Standardized assessments have played a significant role in the development of instruction, curricula, and educational spaces in college physics. However, the use of these…