Related papers: Why and How to Implement Worked Examples in Upper …
Single particle models are sufficient for many topics in introductory physics courses, but become misleading when applied to situations involving changes in internal energy. This paper merges two parallel attempts to reform the teaching of…
In this article we describe special type of mathematical problems that may help develop teaching methods that motivate students to explore patterns, formulate conjectures and find solutions without only memorizing formulas and procedures.…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than contexts, is considered a hallmark of expertise in physics problem solving. With inspiration from a classic study by Chi, Feltovich, and Glaser, we compared…
Tutoring systems improve learning through tailored interventions, such as worked examples, but often suffer from the aptitude-treatment interaction effect where low prior knowledge learners benefit more. We applied the ICAP learning theory…
Computation is a central aspect of modern science and engineering work, and yet, computational instruction has yet to fully pervade university STEM curricula. In physics, we have begun to integrate computation into our courses in a variety…
In a companion paper, we discuss students' ability to take advantage of what they learn from a solved problem and transfer their learning to solve a quiz problem that has different surface features but the same underlying physics…
A common way of learning to perform a task is to observe how it is carried out by experts. However, it is well known that for most tasks there is no unique way to perform them. This is especially noticeable the more complex the task is…
With the advent of high-level programming languages capable of quickly rendering three-dimensional simulations, the inclusion of computers as a learning tool in the classroom has become more prevalent. Although work has begun to study the…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
The large number of published articles in physics journals under the title "Comments on ..." and "Reply to ..." is indicative that the conceptual understanding of physical phenomena is very elusive and hard to grasp even to experts, but it…
Contributing to the literature on aptitude-treatment interactions between worked examples and problem-solving, this paper addresses differential learning from the two approaches when students are positioned as domain experts learning new…
In their study of physics beyond the first year of University -- termed upper-division in the US, many of students' primary learning opportunities come from working long, complex back-of-the-book style problems, and from trying to develop…
The objective of this project is to compare the effectiveness of teaching styles used in high school physics classes and the methods used to assess them. We would like to determine those approaches to physics at the high schools that work…
Dual learning has been successfully applied in many machine learning applications including machine translation, image-to-image transformation, etc. The high-level idea of dual learning is very intuitive: if we map an $x$ from one domain to…
Complex, multi-task problems have proven to be difficult to solve efficiently in a sparse-reward reinforcement learning setting. In order to be sample efficient, multi-task learning requires reuse and sharing of low-level policies. To…
Students must learn effective problem solving strategies in order to develop expertise in physics. Effective problem solving strategies include a conceptual analysis of the problem followed by planning of the solution, and then…
This work advocates Eulerian motion representation learning over the current standard Lagrangian optical flow model. Eulerian motion is well captured by using phase, as obtained by decomposing the image through a complex-steerable pyramid.…
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…
Form a pure mathematical point of view, common functional forms representing different physical phenomena can be defined. For example, rates of chemical reactions, diffusion and heat transfer are all governed by exponential-type…
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…