Related papers: Investigation of student and faculty problem solvi…
As the need for a quantum-ready workforce grows, educators in Quantum Information Science and Engineering (QISE) face the challenge of aligning their programs and courses with industry needs. Through a series of interviews with program…
This paper presents a case-study assessing and analyzing student engagement with and responses to binary, descriptive, and computational questions testing the concepts underlying resistor networks (series and parallel combinations). The…
Analyzing students' written solutions to physics questions is a major area in PER. However, gauging student understanding in college courses is bottlenecked by large class sizes, which limits assessments to a multiple-choice (MC) format for…
Quantum mechanics can seem like a departure from everyday experience of the physical world, but constructivist theories assert that learners build new ideas from their existing ones. To explore how students can navigate this tension, we…
We investigated the impact of incorporating quantitative reasoning for deeper sense-making in a Quantum Interactive Learning Tutorial (QuILT) on students' conceptual performance using a framework emphasizing integration of conceptual and…
The research reported in this article represents a systematic, multi-year investigation of student understanding of the behavior of bipolar junction transistor circuits using a variety of different tasks to isolate and probe key aspects of…
Recently, the National Research Council's framework for next generation science standards highlighted "computational thinking" as one of its "fundamental practices". 9th Grade students taking a physics course that employed the Modeling…
Knowledge distillation compresses a larger neural model (teacher) into smaller, faster student models by training them to match teacher outputs. However, the internal computational transformations that occur during this process remain…
On the surface, behavioural science and physics seem to be two disparate fields of research. However, a closer examination of problems solved by them reveals that they are uniquely related to one another. Exemplified by the theories of…
Several reports in education have called for transforming physics learning environments by promoting sensemaking of real-world scenarios in light of curricular ideas. Recent advancements in Generative-Artificial Intelligence has garnered…
Physics graduate teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for grading. Physics education research suggests that grading practices that place the burden of proof for explicating the problem solving process on students can help them…
We argue that the double-slit experiment can be understood much better by considering it as an experiment whereby one uses electrons to study the set-up rather than an experiment whereby we use a set-up to study the behaviour of electrons.…
Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to…
A common learning goal for modern physics instructors is for students to recognize a difference between the experimental uncertainty of classical physics and the fundamental uncertainty of quantum mechanics. Our prior work has shown that…
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…
Diagrams are ubiquitous in physics, especially in physics education and physics problem solving. Problem solvers may generate diagrams to orient to a scenario, to organize information, to directly extract an answer, or as a tool of…
Quantum mechanics predicts many surprising phenomena, including the two-slit interference of electrons. It has often been claimed that these phenomena cannot be understood in classical terms. But the meaning of "classical" is often not…
What kind of problem-solving instruction can help students apply what they have learned to solve the new and unfamiliar problems they will encounter in the future? We propose that mathematical sensemaking, the practice of seeking coherence…
Computing courses often feature active learning techniques that promote collaboration and social interaction between students. However, neurodivergent students' preferences and experiences with these techniques are not well understood. We…
This paper presents results from the design and testing of an educational version of Quantum Moves, a Scientific Discovery Game that allows players to help solve authentic scientific challenges in the effort to develop a quantum computer.…