Related papers: Academic Miscommunication in Physics
Over 1100 students over four semesters were given the option of taking an introductory undergraduate statistics class either by in-person attendance in lectures or by taking exactly the same class (same instructor, recorded lectures,…
Automated short answer scoring (ASAS) is shifting from discriminative, fine-tuned models to large language models (LLMs) used in few-shot settings. This paradigm leverages LLMs broad world knowledge and ease of deployment, but limited…
Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. The Modeling Framework for Experimental Physics describes the process by which physicists revise their models to account for the newly…
University students taking introductory physics are generally successful executing mathematical procedures in context, but often struggle with the use of mathematical concepts for sense making. Physics instructors note that their students…
One attribute of experts is that they are likely to learn from their own mistakes. Experts are unlikely to make the same mistakes when asked to solve a problem a second time, especially if they had access to a correct solution. Here, we…
Modeling Instruction (MI), an active-learning introductory physics curriculum, has been shown to improve student academic success. Peer-to-peer interactions play a salient role in the MI classroom. Their impact on student interest and…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about knowledge and learning can hinder them from…
Pretraining corpora contain extensive discourse about AI systems, yet the causal influence of this discourse on downstream alignment remains poorly understood. If prevailing descriptions of AI behaviour are predominantly negative, LLMs may…
Bootstrapping and other resampling methods are increasingly appearing in the textbooks and curricula of courses that introduce undergraduate students to statistical methods. In order to teach the bootstrap well, students and instructors…
The anomalous microwave emission (AME) still lacks a conclusive explanation. This excess of emission, roughly between 10 and 50 GHz, tends to defy attempts to explain it as synchrotron or free-free emission. The overlap with frequencies…
Measurement incompatibility stipulates the existence of quantum measurements that cannot be carried out simultaneously on single systems. We show that the set of input-output probabilities obtained from d-dimensional classical systems…
Math anxiety poses significant challenges for university psychology students, affecting their career choices and overall well-being. This study employs a framework based on behavioural forma mentis networks (i.e. cognitive models that map…
Over the last five years, the McGill University Office of Science Education (OSE) has partnered with faculty members from the Department of Physics to form an education research group with the aim of charting the progression of student…
Performance in introductory courses, particularly physics, is often crucial for student success in STEM majors and can impact an individual's tendency to persist in their chosen field. To enhance students' individual learning experiences,…
We examine the relationship between homework completion and exam performance for students having different physics aptitudes for five different semesters of an introductory electricity and magnetism course. In our analysis, we plot exam…
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…
An assumed attribute of expert physicists is that they learn readily from their own mistakes. Experts are unlikely to make the same mistakes when asked to solve a problem a second time, especially if they have had access to a correct…
This article investigates the sensemaking demonstrated in 6th grade students' written responses to a single question free response final exam for physics asking them to recount everything they learned over the course of the academic year.…
This study investigates the influence of ChatGPT, an AI-based language model, on student performance in a physics course. We conducted an experimental analysis with two cohorts of students in a second-semester engineering physics course.…
Senders of messages prefer to communicate uncertainty verbally (e.g., something is likely to happen) rather than numerically (such as 75%), leaving receivers with imprecise information. While it is well established that receivers translate…