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Computational thinking is a new problem soling method named for its extensive use of computer science techniques. It synthesizes critical thinking and existing knowledge and applies them in solving complex technological problems. The term…
A common approach to solving physical reasoning tasks is to train a value learner on example tasks. A limitation of such an approach is that it requires learning about object dynamics solely from reward values assigned to the final state of…
Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students' knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks (the "ConMap" tasks) was developed to probe the…
Studies in Physics Education Research show that interdisciplinary approaches in education foster students' motivation, creativity, curiosity, and interest in physics. We discuss their features and potential role in bringing contemporary…
Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising…
With the advent of high-level programming languages capable of quickly rendering three-dimensional simulations, the inclusion of computers as a learning tool in the classroom has become more prevalent. Although work has begun to study the…
Computation is becoming an increasingly important part of physics education. However, there are currently few theories of learning that can be used to help explain and predict the unique challenges and affordances associated with…
A textbook interpretation of quantum physics is that quantum objects can be described in a particle or a wave picture, depending on the operations and measurements performed. Beyond this widely held believe, we demonstrate in this…
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently gained attention due to their competitive performance on multiple downstream tasks, achieved by following user-input instructions. However, VLMs still exhibit several limitations in visual…
Models of physical systems are used to explain and predict experimental results and observations. When students encounter discrepancies between the actual and expected behavior of a system, they revise their models to include the newly…
We discuss the clusters of resources that emerge when upper-division students write about electromagnetic fields in linear materials. The data analyzed for this paper comes from students' written tests in an upper-division electricity and…
The capability of making explainable inferences regarding physical processes has long been desired. One fundamental physical process is object motion. Inferring what causes the motion of a group of objects can even be a challenging task for…
Students' learning orientation, as applied towards learning problem solving, may be differentiated into learning a problem solving framework for its own sake, learning for the sake of doing well in the course, and non-goal-related…
Objects are entities we act upon, where the functionality of an object is determined by how we interact with it. In this work we propose a Dual Attention Network model which reasons about human-object interactions. The dual-attentional…
Learning and reasoning about physical phenomena is still a challenge in robotics development, and computational sciences play a capital role in the search for accurate methods able to provide explanations for past events and rigorous…
Integrating computation into physics teaching is a curricular move that, at present, has been predominately studied for its cognitive impacts. However, if this modality of instruction shifts how students engage with physics, we argue there…
Human visual reasoning is characterized by an ability to identify abstract patterns from only a small number of examples, and to systematically generalize those patterns to novel inputs. This capacity depends in large part on our ability to…
We conducted an exploratory study in virtual reality to examine if people can discover causal relations in a realistic sensorimotor context and how such learning is represented at different processing levels (conscious-cognitive vs.…
In order for language models to aid physics research, they must first encode representations of mathematical and natural language discourse which lead to coherent explanations, with correct ordering and relevance of statements. We present a…
Nearly 15 years ago, a set of qualitative spatial relations between oriented straight line segments (dipoles) was suggested by Schlieder. This work received substantial interest amongst the qualitative spatial reasoning community. However,…