Related papers: A framework for characterizing covariational reaso…
Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and framing. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for…
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…
Research in student knowledge and learning of science has typically focused on explaining conceptual change. Recent research, however, documents the great degree to which student thinking is dynamic and context-sensitive, implicitly calling…
Most educational literature on conceptual change concerns the process by which introductory students acquire scientific knowledge. However, with modern developments in science and technology, the social significance of learning successive…
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…
It is known that the classical framework of causal models is not general enough to allow for causal reasoning about quantum systems. While the framework has been generalized in a variety of different ways to the quantum case, much of this…
The theme of the World Conference on Physics Education 2012 is "Context, Culture, and Representations." In this talk I present a brief outline of a theoretical framework that allows us to discuss these issues using a model based in…
Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. The Modeling Framework for Experimental Physics describes the process by which physicists revise their models to account for the newly…
This article extends the combinatorial approach to support the determination of contextuality amidst causal influences. Contextuality is an active field of study in Quantum Cognition, in systems relating to mental phenomena, such as…
Underlying any theory of physics is a layer of conceptual frames. They connect the mathematical structures used in theoretical models with physical phenomena, but they also constitute our fundamental assumptions about reality. Many of the…
Instruction in quantum mechanics is becoming increasingly important as the field is not only a key part of modern physics research, but is also important for emerging technologies. However, many students regard quantum mechanics as a…
This paper presents a framework for Quantum causal modeling based on the interpretation of causality as a relation between an observer's probability assignments to hypothetical or counterfactual experiments. The framework is based on the…
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…
Physics is a model of nature able to both describe and predict the results of measurements made with respect to reference systems. These reference systems, in turn, are themselves physical and thus subject to the laws of physics. The…
Causal modelling provides a powerful set of tools for identifying causal structure from observed correlations. It is well known that such techniques fail for quantum systems, unless one introduces `spooky' hidden mechanisms. Whether one can…
A transition of focus from state space to frames of reference and their transformations is argued as being the appropriate setup for ensuring the covariance of physical laws. Such an approach can not only simplify and clarify aspects of…
A system of quantum reasoning for a closed system is developed by treating non-relativistic quantum mechanics as a stochastic theory. The sample space corresponds to a decomposition, as a sum of orthogonal projectors, of the identity…
A common approach to solving physical reasoning tasks is to train a value learner on example tasks. A limitation of such an approach is that it requires learning about object dynamics solely from reward values assigned to the final state of…
In physics, every observation is made with respect to a frame of reference. Although reference frames are usually not considered as degrees of freedom, in all practical situations it is a physical system which constitutes a reference frame.…
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…