Related papers: Using Oral Exams in Physics and Astronomy Courses
This paper provides an overview of common challenges in teaching of logic and formal methods to Computer Science and IT students. We discuss our experiences from the course IN3050: Applied Logic in Engineering, introduced as a "logic for…
Ordinal peer grading has been proposed as a simple and scalable solution for computing reliable information about student performance in massive open online courses. The idea is to outsource the grading task to the students themselves as…
Physical theories are developed to describe phenomena in particular regimes, and generally are valid only within a limited range of scales. For example, general relativity provides an effective description of the Universe at large length…
Science is an inherently quantitative endeavor, and general education science courses are taken by a majority of college students. As such, they are a powerful venue for advancing students' skills and attitudes toward mathematics. This…
Introductory astronomy is one of the most widely-taken university science courses and a common means of satisfying general education requirements. This course is frequently taught in large sections by a variety of instructors, some with…
By measuring the fundamental constants in astrophysical objects one can test basic physical principles as space-time invariance of physical laws along with probing the applicability limits of the standard model of particle physics. The…
We occasionally include projects in our learner-centered introductory astronomy college course to enable non-science major students explore some astronomical concepts in more detail than otherwise. Such projects also highlight ongoing or…
Rapid progress in the capabilities of machine learning approaches in natural language processing has culminated in the rise of large language models over the last two years. Recent works have shown unprecedented adoption of these for…
In recent years, computing has become an important part of the way we teach and learn physics. Teachers, both at high school and college levels, now use computational activities in many of their courses. Physics departments are offering…
Question Answering (QA) is a challenging topic since it requires tackling the various difficulties of natural language understanding. Since evaluation is important not only for identifying the strong and weak points of the various…
A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in…
In experimental physics, lab notebooks play an essential role in the research process. For all of the ubiquity of lab notebooks, little formal attention has been paid to addressing what is considered `best practice' for scientific…
We introduce a class of communication tests where the task is to communicate partial ignorance by means of a physical system. We present a full characterization of the implementations of these tests in the qubit case and partial results for…
Normalization is an important database design method, in the course of the teaching of data modeling the understanding and applying of this method cause problems for students the most. For improving the efficiency of learning normalization…
The modeling theory of instruction is widely applied and highly successful in high-school instruction, and seldom in university physics. One reason is lack of familiarity with models in the physics classroom. Ongoing curriculum development…
Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments…
Iterative peer grading activities may keep students engaged during in-class project presentations. Effective methods for collecting and aggregating peer assessment data are essential. Students tend to grade projects favorably. So, while…
We are witnessing a rapid trend towards the adoption of exercises for evaluation of national research systems, generally based on the peer review approach. They respond to two main needs: stimulating higher efficiency in research activities…
Formal mathematics is mathematics done within the framework of a formal logic. It offers major benefits to mathematicians as well as to computing professionals, engineers, and scientists who use mathematics in their work. The standard…
Teaching is one of the most important factors affecting any education system. Many research efforts have been conducted to facilitate the presentation modes used by instructors in classrooms as well as provide means for students to review…