Related papers: Using Oral Exams in Physics and Astronomy Courses
Scientific communication still mainly relies on natural language written in scientific papers, which makes the described knowledge very difficult to access with automatic means. We can therefore only make limited use of formal knowledge…
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…
Peer grading is the process of students reviewing each others' work, such as homework submissions, and has lately become a popular mechanism used in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Intrigued by this idea, we used it in a course on…
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.…
At the University of Colorado Boulder, as part of our broader efforts to transform middle- and upper-division physics courses, we research students' difficulties with particular concepts, methods, and tools in classical mechanics,…
Individual interviews are often considered to be the gold standard for researchers to understand how people think about phenomena. However, conducting and analyzing interviews is very time consuming. This paper presents the Group…
Although most teachers acknowledge the importance of taking investigative approached in students' science learning experiences, implementing them in high-school classes can be challenging for teachers. In this work, we analyzed data from…
Theoretically as well as experimentally it is investigated how people represent their knowledge in order to make decisions or to share their knowledge with others. Experiment 1 probes into the ways how people 6ather information about the…
What should these lectures be? The subject assigned to us is so broad that many books can be written about it. So, in planning these lectures I had several options. One would be to focus on a narrow subset of topics and to cover them in…
Recent advances in our understanding of the Universe have revolutionized our view of its structure, composition and evolution. However, these new ideas have not necessarily been used to improve the teaching of introductory astronomy…
In this paper we take a brief discussion about the two editions of State Show of Astronomy and its influence in process of student formation. One comparison between numbers of projects registrants and also total teachers registrants, of…
The increasing use of interactive learning strategies in Astro 101 classrooms has led some instructors to consider the usefulness of a textbook in such classes. These strategies provide students a learning modality very different from the…
Over the past 10 years, we have developed at University Paris Sud a first year course on geometrical optics centered on experimentation. In contrast with the traditional top-down learning structure usually applied at university, in which…
As educational systems move from onsite to online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers face the difficulty of designing online examination formats which minimise opportunities for dishonesty. In this paper, we expose our design of such a…
A recent paper evaluating a new rubric-based graduate admissions approach using generic methods tentatively suggested that its decisions differed noticeably from the previous approach in an unspecified way. Using prior knowledge that the…
Science students must deal with the errors inherent to all physical measurements and be conscious of the necessity to express their as a best estimate and a range of uncertainty. Errors are routinely classified as statistical or systematic.…
Here, we present a simple, low-cost format for structured speaking and listening on historical, cultural, and equity-related topics within a physics institute. In this article, we describe how we run hour-long Learning Together sessions,…
The dramatic confrontation between new observations and theories of the early and recent universe makes cosmology one of the most rapidly advancing fields in the physical sciences. The universe is a unique laboratory in which to probe…
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…
We are pleased to present a Special Section on Statistics and Astronomy in this issue of the The Annals of Applied Statistics. Astronomy is an observational rather than experimental science; as a result, astronomical data sets both small…