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A close look at students' written work on examinations offers a wealth of information about their performance, their knowledge of the subject, their strengths, weaknesses and misconceptions, and their overall level of mathematical skills…
Common research tasks ask students to identify a correct answer and justify their answer choice. We propose expanding the array of research tasks to access different knowledge that students might have. By asking students to discuss answers…
The use of new technologies in higher education has surprisingly emphasized students' tendency to adopt a passive behavior in class. Participation and interaction of students are essential to improve academic results. This paper describes…
The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to…
Science is facing a reproducibility crisis. Previous work has proposed incorporating data analysis replications into classrooms as a potential solution. However, despite the potential benefits, it is unclear whether this approach is…
Many instructors choose to assess their students using open-ended written exam items that require students to show their understanding of physics by solving a problem and/or explaining a concept. Grading these items is fairly time…
An important, yet largely unstudied, problem in student data analysis is to detect misconceptions from students' responses to open-response questions. Misconception detection enables instructors to deliver more targeted feedback on the…
A problem faced by many instructors is that of designing exams that accurately assess the abilities of the students. Typically these exams are prepared several days in advance, and generic question scores are used based on rough…
Not only correctness but also self-confidence play an important role in improving the quality of knowledge. Undesirable situations such as confident incorrect and unconfident correct knowledge prevent learners from revising their knowledge…
End of semester student evaluations of teaching are the dominant mechanism for providing feedback to academics on their teaching practice. For large classes, however, the volume of feedback makes these tools impractical for this purpose.…
Asking questions is one of the most crucial pedagogical techniques used by teachers in class. It not only offers open-ended discussions between teachers and students to exchange ideas but also provokes deeper student thought and critical…
Research on reasoning in language models (LMs) predominantly focuses on improving the correctness of their outputs. But some important applications require modeling reasoning patterns that are incorrect. For example, automated systems that…
In education, open-ended quiz questions have become an important tool for assessing the knowledge of students. Yet, manually preparing such questions is a tedious task, and thus automatic question generation has been proposed as a possible…
Classroom response systems (CRSs) can be potent tools for teaching physics. Their efficacy, however, depends strongly on the quality of the questions used. Creating effective questions is difficult, and differs from creating exam and…
Text-based open-ended questions in academic formative and summative assessments help students become deep learners and prepare them to understand concepts for a subsequent conceptual assessment. However, grading text-based questions,…
Students in introductory physics courses often rely on ineffective strategies, focusing on final answers rather than understanding underlying principles. Integrating scientific argumentation into problem-solving fosters critical thinking…
While many methods purport to explain predictions by highlighting salient features, what aims these explanations serve and how they ought to be evaluated often go unstated. In this work, we introduce a framework to quantify the value of…
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…
Digital technologies are becoming increasingly prevalent in education, enabling personalized, high quality education resources to be accessible by students across the world. Importantly, among these resources are diagnostic questions: the…
While proof is a central component of postsecondary mathematical study, proof construction has historically posed significant difficulties for students who intend to earn mathematics degrees at the undergraduate level. This work is…