Related papers: Investigating students' scientific reasoning throu…
In the photonic design problem, a scientist or engineer chooses the physical parameters of a device to best match some desired device behavior. Many instances of the photonic design problem can be naturally stated as a mathematical…
Abductive reasoning, reasoning for inferring explanations for observations, is often mentioned in scientific, design-related and artistic contexts, but its understanding varies across these domains. This paper reviews how abductive…
Computational thinking in physics has many different forms, definitions, and implementations depending on the level of physics, or the institution it is presented in. In order to better integrate computational thinking in introductory…
STEM education researchers are often interested in identifying moments of students' mechanistic reasoning for deeper analysis, but have limited capacity to search through many team conversation transcripts to find segments with a high…
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…
To augment language models with the ability to reason, researchers usually prompt or finetune them to produce chain of thought reasoning steps before producing the final answer. However, although people use natural language to reason…
What are the functions of curiosity? What are the mechanisms of curiosity-driven learning? We approach these questions about the living using concepts and tools from machine learning and developmental robotics. We argue that…
Even though there has been a tremendous amount of research done in how to help students learn physics, students are still coming away missing a crucial piece of the puzzle: why bother with physics? Students learn fundamental laws and how to…
We explore the overlap of two nationally-recognized learning outcomes for physics lab courses, namely, the ability to model experimental systems and the ability to troubleshoot a malfunctioning apparatus. Modeling and troubleshooting are…
Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students'…
Robotic systems are more present in our society everyday. In human-robot environments, it is crucial that end-users may correctly understand their robotic team-partners, in order to collaboratively complete a task. To increase action…
Disordered many-body systems exhibit a wide range of emergent phenomena across different scales. These complex behaviors can be utilized for various information processing tasks such as error correction, learning, and optimization. Despite…
The human reasoning process is seldom a one-way process from an input leading to an output. Instead, it often involves a systematic deduction by ruling out other possible outcomes as a self-checking mechanism. In this paper, we describe the…
Explication and reflection on expert vs. novice considerations within the problem-solving process characterize a cognitive apprenticeship approach for the development of expert-like problem solving practices. In the context of grading, a…
With software systems becoming increasingly pervasive and autonomous, our ability to test for their quality is severely challenged. Many systems are called to operate in uncertain and highly-changing environment, not rarely required to make…
The question of how humans solve problem has been addressed extensively. However, the direct study of the effectiveness of this process seems to be overlooked. In this paper, we address the issue of the effectiveness of human problem…
Science is an inherently quantitative endeavor, and general education science courses are taken by a majority of college students. As such, they are a powerful venue for advancing students' skills and attitudes toward mathematics. This…
Reasoning is a hallmark of human intelligence, enabling adaptive decision-making in complex and unfamiliar scenarios. In contrast, machine intelligence remains bound to training data, lacking the ability to dynamically refine solutions at…
Researchers working within knowledge-in-pieces traditions have often employed observational approaches to investigate micro-processes of learning. There is growing evidence from this line of work that students' intuitive thinking about…
Too often, physics students are beset by feelings of failure and isolation rather than experiencing the creative joys of discovery that physics has to offer. This dissertation research was founded on the desire of a teacher to make physics…