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One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
Most students struggle when faced with complex and ill-structured tasks because the strategies taught in schools and universities simply require finding and applying the correct formulae or strategy to answer well-structured, algorithmic…
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…
"Self-diagnosis tasks" aim at fostering diagnostic behavior by explicitly requiring students to present diagnosis as part of the activity of reviewing their problem solutions. The recitation classes in an introductory physics class (~200…
Self-reflection on learning experiences constitutes a fundamental cognitive process, essential for the consolidation of knowledge and the enhancement of learning efficacy. However, traditional methods to facilitate reflection often face…
High school science classrooms across the United States are answering calls to make computation a part of science learning. The problem is that there is little known about the barriers to learning that computation might bring to a science…
The research presented in this thesis was motivated by the need to improve introductory physics courses. Introductory physics courses are generally the first courses in which students learn to create models to solve complex problems.…
Students who successfully engage in self-regulated learning, are able to plan their own studying, monitoring their progress and make any necessary adjustments based upon the data and feedback they gather. In order to promote this type of…
Science communication skills are considered essential learning objectives for undergraduate physics students. However, high enrollment and limited class resources present significant barriers to providing students ample opportunities to…
Findings from existing research provide possible evidence that values are an important construct that should be part of the self-reflection process. However, many questions about value reflection remain unexplored. As such, this position…
We discuss two proof evaluation activities meant to promote the acquisition of learning behaviors of professional mathematics within an introductory undergraduate proof-writing course. These learning behaviors include the ability to read…
Inequities in student access to trigonometry and calculus are often associated with racial and socioeconomic privilege, and often influence introductory physics course performance. To mitigate these disparities in student preparedness, we…
Reflection is a critical aspect of the learning process. However, educational games tend to focus on supporting learning concepts rather than supporting reflection. While reflection occurs in educational games, the educational game design…
Despite the prevalence of physics education research literature related to problem solving, recent studies have illustrated that opportunities for ``authentic'' problem solving -- conceptualized as making decisions with limited information…
Student learning of sound waves can be helped through the creation of group-learning classroom materials whose development and design rely on explicit investigations into student understanding. We describe reasoning in terms of sets of…
Developing students' ability to troubleshoot is an important learning outcome for many undergraduate physics lab courses, especially electronics courses. In other work, metacognition has been identified as an important feature of…
Developing expert-like problem-solving skills is a central goal of undergraduate physics education. In this study, we investigate the impact of teaching explicit problem-solving frameworks, combined with deliberate practice, on students'…
While the positive outcomes of undergraduate research experiences (UREs) have been extensively categorized, the mechanisms for those outcomes are less understood. Through lightly structured focus group interviews, we have extracted the…
Upper-division physics students spend much of their time solving problems. In addition to their basic skills and background, their epistemic framing can form an important part of their ability to learn physics from these problems.…
In this paper we investigate the extent to which students' problem-solving behaviors change as a result of working on multi-faceted, context-rich problems. During the semester, groups of two to three students work on several problems that…