Related papers: Using Oral Exams in Physics and Astronomy Courses
Asking questions during class time is one form of participation not commonly employed by members of underrepresented groups in large enrollment college classrooms, even though the form of participation is highly conducive to student…
Optical systems are becoming increasingly important by resolving many bottlenecks in today's communication, electronics, and biomedical systems. However, given the continuous nature of optics, the inability to efficiently analyze optical…
Upper limits and confidence intervals are a convenient way to present experimental results. With modern experiments producing more and more data, it is often necessary to reduce the volume of the results for convenient distribution. A…
Artificial intelligence assisted mathematical proof has become a highly focused area nowadays. One key problem in this field is to generate formal mathematical proofs from natural language proofs. Due to historical reasons, the formal proof…
Instilling good laboratory working attitudes in students is a difficult but very important task, especially in the first level courses. The introduction of a grade, based on the observation of work practices during laboratory sessions, can…
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many institutions such as universities and workplaces implemented testing regimens with every member of some population tested longitudinally, and those testing positive isolated for some time. Although the…
This is a report of a course on modern physics designed and taught to undergraduate science and engineering students in the Spring of 2013. The course, meant for freshmen, attempts to integrate statistical mechanics into non-classical…
Question answering (QA) systems are among the most important and rapidly developing research topics in natural language processing (NLP). A reason, therefore, is that a QA system allows humans to interact more naturally with a machine,…
Oral examinations are a prevalent but psychologically demanding form of assessment in higher education. Many students experience intense anxiety, which can impair cognitive performance and hinder academic success. This position paper…
Multiple testing problems arise naturally in scientific studies because of the need to capture or convey more information with more variables. The literature is enormous, but the emphasis is primarily methodological, providing numerous…
We present an Open Educational Resource system that instructors can use to assign automatically graded, randomized, and scaffolded assessment questions for astronomy classes.
A problem faced by many instructors is that of designing exams that accurately assess the abilities of the students. Typically these exams are prepared several days in advance, and generic question scores are used based on rough…
Despite the large body of research showing that students in STEM classes at all levels learn better via active learning than they do via lecture, post-secondary physics and astronomy (P&A) faculty members continue to primarily use…
Instructors in introductory physics courses often use labs and demonstrations to reinforce that the physics equations introduced in lectures and textbooks describe what actually happens in the real world. The surface features and…
Feedback has a powerful influence on learning, but it is also expensive to provide. In large classes, it may even be impossible for instructors to provide individualized feedback. Peer assessment has received attention lately as a way of…
Empirical studies on formal methods and tools are rare. In this paper, we provide guidelines for such studies. We mention their main ingredients and then define nine different study strategies (laboratory experiments with software and human…
Physics in Films is an alternative version of the physical science course offered to non-science majors at the University of Central Florida. The course uses the popularity of Hollywood films to generate interest in science and to engage…
Assigning course grades to students requires obtaining accurate measures of the students' understanding and knowledge of the topic. The induced stress from a traditional summative assessment is known to negatively impact student grades,…
We shall describe the various activities done by us in Covid Times including outreach and educational workshops in Physics and Astronomy. We shall discuss the caveats in virtual teaching of Astronomy and the lessons learnt in the process.
Over the past year and a half we have developed an innovative approach to the teaching of `Physical Science', a general education course typically found in the curricula of nearly every college and university. The new approach uses popular…