Related papers: Helping students become proficient problem solvers…
Developing students' ability to troubleshoot is an important learning outcome for many undergraduate physics lab courses, especially electronics courses. In other work, metacognition has been identified as an important feature of…
Effective physics learning, especially in complex topics, requires balancing mathematical formalism with conceptual understanding. Conceptual problem-solving involves connecting math to physical reality, and using an epistemological…
The ability to categorize problems is a measure of expertise in a domain. In order to help students learn effectively, instructors and teaching assistants (TAs) should have pedagogical content knowledge. They must be aware of the prior…
Metacognition is an important aspect in creative problem solving (CPS) and through this chapter we analyse the meta-reasoning aspects applied in the different processes of monitoring the progress of learners' reasoning and CPS activities.…
Recruiting and retaining highly qualified physics and physical science teachers is critical for maintaining America's global competitiveness. Unfortunately, only one third of the high school teachers in physics have a degree in physics and…
We describe the development of a junior-senior level course for Physics majors designed to teach Mathematica skills in support of their undergraduate coursework, but also to introduce students to modern research level results. Standard…
Metacognition has been recognized as an essential skill for academic success and for performance in solving problems. During learning or problem-solving, metacognitive skills facilitate a range of cognitive and affective processes, leading…
A primary goal of physics is to create mathematical models that allow both predictions and explanations of physical phenomena. We weave maths extensively into our physics instruction beginning in high school, and the level and complexity of…
Students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can profoundly influence their motivation to learn and development of expertise. We developed and validated an Attitudes and Approaches to Problem Solving survey by expanding…
As part of a longitudinal study into identity development in upper-level physics students, a phenomenographic research method was used to examine students' perceptions of what it means to be a physicist. The results revealed four different…
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…
Despite the recognition that reflection is an essential part of problem solving, it is often not emphasized in upper-division physics courses. In this paper, we discuss homework corrections (HWCs) as a pedagogical tool to motivate…
We studied the impact of metacognitive reflections on recently completed work as a way to improve the retention of newly-learned problem-solving techniques. Students video-recorded themselves talking through problems immediately after…
We introduce PHYSICS, a comprehensive benchmark for university-level physics problem solving. It contains 1297 expert-annotated problems covering six core areas: classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and statistical…
This paper summarizes some challenges encountered and best practices established in several years of teaching Machine Learning for the Physical Sciences at the undergraduate and graduate level. I discuss motivations for teaching ML to…
Education is a goal-oriented field. But if we want to treat education scientifically so we can accumulate, evaluate, and refine what we learn, then we must develop a theoretical framework that is strongly rooted in objective observations…
We present two programs that address needs to better prepare graduate students for their roles as professional physicists, particularly in the areas of teaching and education research. The two programs, Preparing Future Physicists (PFP) and…
In this paper we investigate the extent to which students' problem-solving behaviors change as a result of working on multi-faceted, context-rich problems. During the semester, groups of two to three students work on several problems that…
Our main goal is to develop plans to increase physics enrollment. Once again we thoroughly analyze the problem from the beginning and reach the conclusion that the most appropriate starting point in this direction should be to look into…
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,…