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Assessing student learning is a cornerstone of educational practice. Standardized assessments have played a significant role in the development of instruction, curricula, and educational spaces in college physics. However, the use of these…
A good teacher should not only be knowledgeable, but should also be able to communicate in a way that the student understands -- to share the student's representation of the world. In this work, we introduce a new controlled experimental…
Creating equitable performance outcomes among students is a focus of many instructors and researchers. One focus of this effort is examining disparities in physics student performance across genders, which is a well-established problem.…
Reinforcement learning, which acquires a policy maximizing long-term rewards, has been actively studied. Unfortunately, this learning type is too slow and difficult to use in practical situations because the state-action space becomes huge…
In this paper we describe a statistical procedure to account for differences in grading practices from one course to another. The goal is to define a course "inflatedness" and a student "aptitude" that best captures one's intuitive notions…
Most science classes and in particular Physics are delivered through traditional teaching methods. More specifically, in the traditional stand-and-deliver lecture, the information was transmitted unilaterally from the teacher to the student…
In this work, I present an automatic system for the evaluation of closed-type exercises in physics at the high school level or in the first year of a degree where physics is a mandatory course. It is expected that this will allow students…
We discuss the development, implementation, and assessment of a course for science undergraduates designed to help them develop an awareness and a deeper appreciation of the intellectual demands of physics teaching. The course focused on…
We investigated physics students' learning experience and behaviour in a second-year laboratory by analyzing transcribed audio recordings of laboratory sessions. One student group was given both a problem and procedure and asked to analyze…
Computational thinking has been a recent focus of education research within the sciences. However, there is a dearth of scholarly literature on how best to teach and to assess this topic, especially in disciplinary science courses. Physics…
Instructors and students alike are often focused on the grade in programming assignments as a key measure of how well a student is mastering the material and whether a student is struggling. This can be, however, misleading. Especially when…
Contract scheduling is a widely studied framework for designing real-time systems with interruptible capabilities. Previous work has showed that a prediction on the interruption time can help improve the performance of contract-based…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) are often used as virtual tutors in computer science (CS) education, this approach can foster passive learning and over-reliance. This paper presents a novel pedagogical paradigm that inverts this model:…
Peer grading systems make large courses more scalable, provide students with faster and more detailed feedback, and help students to learn by thinking critically about the work of others. A key obstacle to the broader adoption of peer…
Problem solving is an integral part of any physics curriculum, and most physics instructors would likely agree that the associated learner competencies are best assessed by considering the solution path: not only the final solution matters,…
Developing expertise in physics requires appropriate integration and assimilation of physics and mathematics. Instructors and students often describe physics courses in terms of their emphasis on conceptual and quantitative problem-solving.…
In physics labs, students experience a wide range of equitable and inequitable interactions. We developed a methodology to characterize different lab groups in terms of their bid exchanges and inchargeness. An equitable group is one in…
The effect of class size on student learning has numerous policy implications and has been a major subject of conversation and research for decades. Despite this, few studies have been done on class size in the context of university…
Large programming courses struggle to provide timely, detailed feedback on student code. We developed Mark My Works, a local autograding system that combines traditional unit testing with LLM-generated explanations. The system uses…
Engaging in meaningful collaborations with peers, both inside and outside the classroom, can greatly enhance students' understanding of physics and other STEM disciplines. We analyzed the characteristics of women and men who typically…