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Educators must make decisions about learner expectations and skills on which to focus when it comes to laboratory activities. There are various approaches but the general pattern is to encourage students to measure ordered pairs, plot a…
Research shows that expert-like approaches to problem-solving can be promoted by encouraging students to explicate their thought processes and follow a prescribed problem-solving strategy. Since grading communicates instructors'…
This paper is concerned with the quasi-linear reflected backward stochastic partial differential equation (RBSPDE for short). Basing on the theory of backward stochastic partial differential equation and the parabolic capacity and…
This paper examines the educational impact of the implementation of "Changes in Energy and Momentum" from the Tutorials in Introductory Physics in five different instructional settings. These settings include (1) a completely computer-based…
This paper describes a general formalism for obtaining localized solutions to a class of problems in mathematical physics, which can be recast as variational optimization problems. This class includes the important cases of Schr\"odinger's…
While intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) can use information from past students to personalize instruction, each new student is unique. Moreover, the education problem is inherently difficult because the learning process is only partially…
The narrow escape problem consists of deriving the asymptotic expansion of the solution of a drift-diffusion equation with the Dirichlet boundary condition on a small absorbing part of the boundary and the Neumann boundary condition on the…
We study the problem of programmatic reinforcement learning, in which policies are represented as short programs in a symbolic language. Programmatic policies can be more interpretable, generalizable, and amenable to formal verification…
Problem. Educational disparities in Mathematics performance are a persistent challenge. This study aims to unravel the complex factors contributing to these disparities among students internationally, with a focus on the interpretability of…
The authors use an action research (AR) approach in a collegiate studio physics class to investigate the power of partnerships via conferences as they relate to issues of establishing a student/mentor rapport, empowering students to reduce…
In this work, we introduce a learning model designed to meet the needs of applications in which computational resources are limited, and robustness and interpretability are prioritized. Learning problems can be formulated as constrained…
The question-answering (QA) capabilities of foundation models are highly sensitive to prompt variations, rendering their performance susceptible to superficial, non-meaning-altering changes. This vulnerability often stems from the model's…
K-12 teachers employ Engineering Design Challenges to help students learn about the Engineering Design Process hands-on. They use techniques like hard scaffolding questions to guide the students as they think through the different stages of…
The effective application of representation learning to real-world problems requires both techniques for learning useful representations, and also robust ways to evaluate properties of representations. Recent work in disentangled…
We consider large-scale Markov decision processes with an unknown cost function and address the problem of learning a policy from a finite set of expert demonstrations. We assume that the learner is not allowed to interact with the expert…
According to the literature, mobile devices as experimental tools (MDET) can offer educational benefits by creating authentic, real-life contexts for physics learning, enhancing student motivation through the use of familiar technology, and…
Upper-division physics students spend much of their time solving problems. In addition to their basic skills and background, their epistemic framing can form an important part of their ability to learn physics from these problems.…
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…
The Maryland Physics Expectations Survey (MPEX) describes student attitudes and expectations toward learning, and might be used to predict normalized gains on tests such as the Force and Motion Concept Evaluation (FMCE). These predictions…
Mastery learning improves learning proficiency and efficiency. However, the overpractice of skills--students spending time on skills they have already mastered--remains a fundamental challenge for tutoring systems. Previous research has…