Related papers: Using Oral Exams in Physics and Astronomy Courses
The timing of radio pulsars in binary systems provides a superb testing ground of general relativity. Here we propose a Bayesian approach to carry out these tests, and a relevant efficient numerical implementation, that has several…
The observation of space seems to have always caused wonder into people's collective consciousness, generating a series of historical myths. More recently specially with the development of better tools alongside the constant refinement of…
We investigated physics students' learning experience and behaviour in a second-year laboratory by analyzing transcribed audio recordings of laboratory sessions. One student group was given both a problem and procedure and asked to analyze…
Students in our AI/ML course submitted polished, well-argued project analyses. Then, in class discussion, we asked them to walk through a single choice from their own work. Many could not. The writing looked great. The understanding often…
Evaluating teaching effectiveness at scale remains a persistent challenge for large universities, particularly within engineering programs that enroll tens of thousands of students. Traditional methods, such as manual review of student…
In recent years we have explored using Haskell alongside a traditional mathematical formalism in our large-enrolment university course on topics including logic and formal languages, aiming to offer our students a programming perspective on…
The Lecture-Tutorials for Introductory Astronomy have been designed to help introductory astronomy instructors actively engage their students in developing their conceptual understandings and reasoning abilities across a wide range of…
Interactive proof assistants make it possible for ordinary mathematicians to write definitions and theorems in a formal proof language, like a programming language, so that a computer can parse them and check them against the rules of a…
This is a summary of the `Astronomy Perspective' of the 4th meeting on 'Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy' held at Penn State University in June 2006. We comment on trends in the Astronomy community towards Bayesian methods and…
Quantum mechanics, in its orthodox version, imposes severe limits on what can be known, or even said, about the condition of a quantum system between two observations. A relatively new approach, based on so-called "weak measurements",…
Scientific feasibility assessment asks whether a claim is consistent with established knowledge and whether experimental evidence could support or refute it. We frame feasibility assessment as a diagnostic reasoning task in which, given a…
Students express a wide range of preferences for learning environments. We are trying to measure the manifestation of learning styles in various learning environments. In particular, we are interested in performance in an environment that…
This paper reports on an investigation into the correlations between students' understandings of introductory astronomy concepts and the correctness and coherency of their written responses to targeted Lecture-Tutorial questions. We…
We report on the development of students' ideas of probability and probability density in a University of Maine laboratory-based general education physics course called Intuitive Quantum Physics. Students in the course are generally math…
System modeling is a classical approach to ensure their reliability since it is suitable both for a formal verification and for software testing techniques. In the context of model-based testing an approach combining random testing and…
Experimental activities are an essential part of physics education. In addition to conveying scientific knowledge, they play a significant role in developing scientific literacy, inquiry skills, and critical thinking. In today's world,…
Regular expressions in an Automata Theory and Formal Languages course are mostly treated as a theoretical topic. That is, to some degree their mathematical properties and their role to describe languages is discussed. This approach fails to…
Cultural Astronomy is interdisciplinary connecting the arts, humanities, social & physical sciences. Data collection methods and theories are used from many disciplines and meld with methods and theories within cultural astronomy. The…
The aim of this study is to investigate the decisions and reasoning of undergraduate students when choosing simple measurement instruments in an introductory physics laboratory course. For this study, we have developed a questionnaire and…
A significant amount of research has considered mathematical proofs, the students who learn them, and the instructors that teach them, from a variety of perspectives. This paper considers this topic from four main perspectives: students'…