Related papers: Helping students become proficient problem solvers…
Current concerns over reforming engineering education have focused attention on helping students develop skills and an adaptive expertise. Phenomenological guidelines for instruction along these lines can be understood as arising out of an…
We discuss the development, implementation, and assessment of a course for science undergraduates designed to help them develop an awareness and a deeper appreciation of the intellectual demands of physics teaching. The course focused on…
Learning to think like a physicist (LTP) is often cited as a central goal of graduate physics education, yet what this means in practice and the extent to which physics graduate education prepares students to develop LTP and view LTP as…
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…
In this companion paper, we explore the use of isomorphic problem pairs (IPPs) to assess introductory physics students' ability to solve and successfully transfer problem-solving knowledge from one context to another in mechanics. We call…
Physics Education Research (PER) applies a scientific approach to the question, "How do our students think about and learn physics?" PER allows us to explore such intellectually engaging questions as, "What does it mean to understand…
We discuss the categorization of 20 quantum mechanics problems by physics professors and undergraduate students from two honors-level quantum mechanics courses. Professors and students were asked to categorize the problems based upon…
Physical properties of materials are seldom studied in the context of packing problems. In this work we study the behavior of semifluids: materials with particular characteristics, that share properties both with solids and with fluids. We…
Many real-world control problems involve both discrete decision variables - such as the choice of control modes, gear switching or digital outputs - as well as continuous decision variables - such as velocity setpoints, control gains or…
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…
Learning physics requires understanding the applicability of fundamental principles in a variety of contexts that share deep features. One way to help students learn physics is via analogical reasoning. Students can be taught to make an…
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…
Case-oriented physics education research - which seeks to refine and develop theory by linking that theory to cases - incorporates distinct practices for selecting data for analysis, generalizing results, and making causal claims.…
This survey examines the broad suite of methods and models for combining machine learning with physics knowledge for prediction and forecast, with a focus on partial differential equations. These methods have attracted significant interest…
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…
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…
This paper proposes a formal cognitive framework for problem solving based on category theory. We introduce cognitive categories, which are categories with exactly one morphism between any two objects. Objects in these categories are…
This paper investigates the interactions between context and professional development of physics instructors in a case study of two physics faculty. A phenomenological-case study approach was used to analyze two physics faculty at different…
Computational thinking is a key skill for space science graduates, who must apply advanced problem-solving skills to model complex systems, analyse big data sets, and develop control software for mission-critical space systems. We describe…
Computation has revolutionized science and is gradually making its way into science teaching and learning. However, we currently lack theoretical frameworks to make sense of how students learn to use computation as a disciplinary tool. In…