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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.…
Recruiting and retaining highly qualified physics and physical science teachers is critical for maintaining America's global competitiveness. Unfortunately, only one third of the high school teachers in physics have a degree in physics and…
We present a study of LLM integration in final-year undergraduate astronomy education, examining how students develop AI literacy through structured guidance and documentation requirements. We developed AstroTutor, a domain-specific…
Successful implementation of active learning strategies in the engineering classroom -- and in particular in certain subjects which are highly technological in nature such as, for instance, rocket engines and space propulsion -- means…
This innovative practice category paper presents an innovative framework for teaching Reinforcement Learning (RL) at the undergraduate level. Recognizing the challenges posed by the complex theoretical foundations of the subject and the…
The course description provided by instructors is an important piece of information as it defines what is expected from the instructor and what he/she is going to deliver during a particular course. One of the key components of a course…
General-education college astronomy courses offer instructors both a unique audience and a unique challenge. For many students, such a course may be their first time encountering a standalone astronomy class, and it is also likely one of…
Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing education, with LLM-based agents playing a key role in simulating student behavior. A major challenge in student simulation is modeling the diverse learning patterns of students at various…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become part of how students solve programming tasks, offering immediate explanations and even full solutions. Previous work has highlighted that novice programmers often heavily rely on LLMs, thereby…
Optical turbulence presents a significant challenge for communication, directed energy, and imaging systems, especially in the atmospheric boundary layer. Effective modeling of optical turbulence strength is critical for the development and…
At the University of Colorado Boulder, as part of our broader efforts to transform middle- and upper-division physics courses, we research students' difficulties with particular concepts, methods, and tools in classical mechanics,…
Proficiency with calculating, reporting, and understanding measurement uncertainty is a nationally recognized learning outcome for undergraduate physics lab courses. The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) is a research-based assessment…
The ubiquity of technology in our daily lives and the economic stability of the technology sector in recent years, especially in areas with a computer science footing, has led to an increase in computer science enrollment in many parts of…
This document describes the R package UBL that allows the use of several methods for handling utility-based learning problems. Classification and regression problems that assume non-uniform costs and/or benefits pose serious challenges to…
In its most general form, a `secret objective' is any inconsistency between the experimental reality and the information provided to students prior to starting work on an experiment. Students are challenged to identify the secret objectives…
We investigate students' sense of ownership of multiweek final projects in an upper-division optics lab course. Using a multiple case study approach, we describe three student projects in detail. Within-case analyses focused on identifying…
The scope of this teaching package is to make a brief induction to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for people who have no previous knowledge of them. We first make a brief introduction to models of networks, for then describing in general…
This article introduces a set of distance education astronomy laboratory exercises for use by college students and instructors and discuss first usage results. This General Astronomy Education Source (GEAS) exercise set contains eight…
This paper investigates supervised fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) to improve their pedagogical alignment in computing education, addressing concerns that LLMs may hinder learning outcomes. The project utilised a proprietary…
Background: Software project management activities help to introduce software process models in Software Engineering courses. However, these activities should be adequately aligned with the learning outcomes and support student's…