Related papers: What we talk about when we talk about physics prob…
During recent collaboration with colleagues to revise our institution's general-education curriculum, I encountered many perceptions of what we mean by the Natural Sciences. I was surprised to find that perceptions of scientific pedagogy…
Software testing is a complex, intellectual activity based (at least) on analysis, reasoning, decision making, abstraction and collaboration performed in a highly demanding environment. Naturally, it uses and allocates multiple cognitive…
Given a physics scenario, different problem types presenting that scenario in various ways can emphasize different instructional goals. In this investigation, we examined the views of physics graduate teaching assistants (TAs) about the…
Almost all theories of physics have expressed physical laws by means of differential equations. One can ask: why differential equations? What is special about them? This article addresses these questions and is presented as an inquiry-based…
Helping students learn from their own mistakes can help them develop habits of mind while learning physics content. Based upon cognitive apprenticeship model, we asked students to self-diagnose their mistakes and learn from reflecting on…
There has been a growing interest in enhancing the mathematical problem-solving (MPS) capabilities of large language models. While the majority of research efforts concentrate on creating specialized models to solve mathematical problems,…
Learning is traditionally studied in biological or computational systems. The power of learning frameworks in solving hard inverse-problems provides an appealing case for the development of `physical learning' in which physical systems…
Upper-division physics students spend much of their time solving problems. In addition to their basic skills and background, their epistemic framing can form an important part of their ability to learn physics from these problems.…
When deploying online homework in physics courses, an important consideration is how many attempts should be allowed in order to solve numerical free-response problems. While on the one hand, the maximum number of attempts should be large…
I think that the main reason why we do not understand the general principles of how knowledge works (and probably also the reason why we have not yet designed and built efficient machines capable of artificial intelligence), is not the…
Finding general principles underlying brain function has been appealing to scientists. Indeed, in some branches of science like physics and chemistry (and to some degree biology) a general theory often can capture the essence of a wide…
Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced and are increasingly capable of tackling complex scientific problems, including those in physics. Despite this progress, current LLMs often fail to emulate the concise, principle-based…
There is a mismatch between psychological and computational studies on emotions. Psychological research aims at explaining and documenting internal mechanisms of these phenomena, while computational work often simplifies them into labels.…
On the surface, behavioural science and physics seem to be two disparate fields of research. However, a closer examination of problems solved by them reveals that they are uniquely related to one another. Exemplified by the theories of…
How students use mathematics in their physics classes has been studied extensively in the physics education literature. In addition to specific mathematical methods in specific physics contexts, possible effects of more general "cultural"…
We examine the effect of misconceptions about friction on students' ability to solve problems and transfer from one context to another. We analyze written responses to paired isomorphic problems given to introductory physics students and…
The hard problem in consciousness is the problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to subjective conscious experience. In this paper, I suggest that in order to understand the relationship between…
This paper re-centres the discussion of student learning in physics to focus on context. In order to do so, a theoretically-motivated understanding of context is developed. Given a well-defined notion of context, data from a novel…
Drawing appropriate diagrams is a useful problem solving heuristic that can transform a give problem into a representation that is easier to exploit for solving it. A major focus while helping introductory physics students learn problem…
Learning physics is a context dependent process. I consider a broader interdisciplinary problem of where differences in understanding and reasoning arise. I suggest the long run effects a multiple choice based learning system as well as…