Related papers: Investigating students' scientific reasoning throu…
Physics is considered as one of the most prevailing and problematic subjects by the students in the realm of science. Students perceived physics as a difficult subject during high school days and become more evasive when they reach college.…
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…
We use the Survey of Thermodynamic Processes and First and Second Laws-Long (STPFaSL-Long), a research-based survey instrument with 78 items at the level of introductory physics, to investigate introductory and advanced students'…
Learning internal reasoning processes is crucial for developing AI systems capable of sustained adaptation in dynamic real-world environments. However, most existing approaches primarily emphasize learning task-specific outputs or static…
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…
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,…
Troubleshooting systems is integral to experimental physics in both research and instructional laboratory settings. The recently adopted AAPT Lab Guidelines identify troubleshooting as an important learning outcome of the undergraduate…
This invited paper is a passionate pitch for the significance of logic in scientific education. Logic helps focus on the essential core to identify the foundations of ideas and provides corresponding longevity with the resulting approach to…
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.…
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…
As educators we often ask our physics students to work in groups---on tutorials, during in-class discussions, and on homework, projects, or exams. Researchers have documented the benefits of group work for students' conceptual mastery and…
The ASK-IT/Assessing-to-Learn (A2L) project is an attempt to bring a strategic approach to learning, instruction, and communication. ASK-IT/A2L seeks to integrate formative assessment and classroom response system use with physics…
There are two important things in science: (A) Finding answers to given questions, and (B) Coming up with good questions. Our artificial scientists not only learn to answer given questions, but also continually invent new questions, by…
We present a method for incorporating a stochastic point of view into physics exercises of mathematics education. The core of our method is the randomization of some inputs, the system model used does not differ from what we would use in…
University courses in conceptual physics and astronomy typically serve as the terminal science experience for non-science majors. Significant work has gone into developing research-verified pedagogical methods for the algebra- and…
Problem solving is central to physics instruction. Results from Physics Education Research (PER), however, demonstrate that traditional ways of teaching with problem solving are inefficient and ineffective for promoting true physics…
Mathematics is an essential element of physics problem solving, but experts often fail to appreciate exactly how they use it. Math may be the language of science, but math-in-physics is a distinct dialect of that language. Physicists tend…
Uncertainty is an important and fundamental concept in physics education. Students are often first exposed to uncertainty in introductory labs, expand their knowledge across lab courses, and then are introduced to quantum mechanical…
The ability to derive underlying principles from a handful of observations and then generalize to novel situations -- known as inductive reasoning -- is central to human intelligence. Prior work suggests that language models (LMs) often…
Students in introductory physics struggle with vector algebra and these challenges are often associated with contextual and representational features of the problems. Performance on problems about cross product direction is particularly…