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Compared with introductory physics, relatively little is known about the development of expertise in advanced physics courses, especially in the case of quantum mechanics. Here, we describe a framework for understanding the patterns of…
Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. When students encounter discrepancies between the actual and expected behavior of a system, they revise their models to include the newly…
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…
Causal inference is central to many areas of artificial intelligence, including complex reasoning, planning, knowledge-base construction, robotics, explanation, and fairness. An active community of researchers develops and enhances…
The capability of making explainable inferences regarding physical processes has long been desired. One fundamental physical process is object motion. Inferring what causes the motion of a group of objects can even be a challenging task for…
Sound educational policy recommendations require valid estimates of causal effects, but observational studies in physics education research sometimes have loosely specified causal hypotheses. The connections between the observational data…
The amount of published research in Physics Education Research (PER) shows, on one hand, an increasing interest in the design and development of high performance physics teaching strategies, and, on the other hand, it tries to understand…
Evidence-based reasoning is at the core of many problem-solving and decision-making tasks in a wide variety of domains. Generalizing from the research and development of cognitive agents in several such domains, this paper presents progress…
When students are learning to use math in physics, one of the most important ideas they need to learn is that equations are not just calculational tools; they represent relationships between physical variables that change together (covary).…
In a recent report, the American Association of Physics Teachers has developed an updated set of recommendations for curriculum of undergraduate physics labs.1 This document focuses on six major themes: constructing knowledge, modeling,…
Understanding how physicists solve problems can guide the development of methods that help students learn and improve at solving complex problems. Leveraging the framework of cognitive task analysis, we conducted semi-structured interviews…
Computation is becoming an increasingly important part of physics education. However, there are currently few theories of learning that can be used to help explain and predict the unique challenges and affordances associated with…
Computation is a central aspect of 21st century physics practice; it is used to model complicated systems, to simulate impossible experiments, and to analyze mountains of data. Physics departments and their faculty are increasingly…
Mathematical reasoning flexibility across physics contexts is a desirable learning outcome of introductory physics, where the math world and physical world meet. Physics Quantitative Literacy (PQL) is a set of interconnected skills and…
We give a mathematical framework to describe the evolution of an open quantum systems subjected to finitely many interactions with classical apparatuses. The systems in question may be composed of distinct, spatially separated subsystems…
Classical planning asks for a sequence of operators reaching a given goal. While the most common case is to compute a plan, many scenarios require more than that. However, quantitative reasoning on the plan space remains mostly unexplored.…
Visual representation learning is ubiquitous in various real-world applications, including visual comprehension, video understanding, multi-modal analysis, human-computer interaction, and urban computing. Due to the emergence of huge…
Mathematics is a critical part of much scientific research. Physics in particular weaves math extensively into its instruction beginning in high school. Despite much research on the learning of both physics and math, the problem of how to…
Partial derivatives are used in a variety of different ways within physics. Most notably, thermodynamics uses partial derivatives in ways that students often find confusing. As part of a collaboration with mathematics faculty, we are at the…
The paper gives an overview of recent advances in structural equation modeling. A structural equation model is a multivariate statistical model that is determined by a mixed graph, also known as a path diagram. Our focus is on the…