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Professional development workshops are commonly used to promote the adoption of research-based instructional strategies among physics and astronomy faculty. After learning about such strategies, faculty are often motivated to modify and…
We are investigating cognitive issues in learning quantum mechanics in order to develop effective teaching and learning tools. The analysis of cognitive issues is particularly important for bridging the gap between the quantitative and…
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…
In their study of physics beyond the first year of University -- termed upper-division in the US, many of students' primary learning opportunities come from working long, complex back-of-the-book style problems, and from trying to develop…
A typical problem in MOOCs is the missing opportunity for course conductors to individually support students in overcoming their problems and misconceptions. This paper presents the results of automatically intervening on struggling…
Corrections offer a natural modality for people to provide feedback to a robot, by (i) intervening in the robot's behavior when they believe the robot is failing (or will fail) the task objectives and (ii) modifying the robot's behavior to…
Physics faculty care about their students learning physics content. In addition, they usually hope that their students will learn some deeper lessons about thinking critically and scientifically. They hope that as a result of taking a…
Many undergraduate students of engineering and the exact sciences have difficulty with their mathematics courses due to insufficient proficiency in what we in this paper have termed clear thinking. We believe that this lack of proficiency…
Introductory mechanics ("physics 1") is a critical gateway course for students desiring to pursue a STEM career. A major challenge with this course is that there is a large spread in the students' incoming physics preparation, and this…
Studying for physics exams can be difficult and stressful, especially during a student's introductory year in physics. For students who do not plan to major in physics, the desire to do well is based less on understanding concepts and more…
Separation of variables can be a powerful technique for solving many of the partial differential equations that arise in physics contexts. Upper-division physics students encounter this technique in multiple topical areas including…
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…
We describe the development of a junior-senior level course for Physics majors designed to teach Mathematica skills in support of their undergraduate coursework, but also to introduce students to modern research level results. Standard…
Students' answers to tasks provide a valuable source of information in teaching as they result from applying cognitive processes to a learning content addressed in the task. Due to steadily increasing course sizes, analyzing student answers…
Solving exercise problems by yourself is a vital part of developing a mechanical understanding. Yet, most mechanics lectures have more than 200 participants, so the workload for manually creating and correcting assignments limits the number…
This paper draws together nine strategies for creative visualization activities. Teaching visualization often involves running learning activities where students perform tasks that directly support one or more topics that the teacher wishes…
We are interested in better understanding ways that students collaborate to solve conceptual physics problems in the context of spherical unit vectors in upper-level E&M, especially problems that have been shown to be difficult for students…
It is well-known that introductory physics students often have alternative conceptions that are inconsistent with established physical principles and concepts. Invoking alternative conceptions in quantitative problem-solving process can…
The large number of published articles in physics journals under the title "Comments on ..." and "Reply to ..." is indicative that the conceptual understanding of physical phenomena is very elusive and hard to grasp even to experts, but it…
Reflective writing is part of many higher education courses across the globe. It is often considered a challenging task for students as it requires self-regulated learning skills to appropriately plan, timely engage and deeply reflect on…