Related papers: Epistemology mediating conceptual knowledge: Const…

Physics Education Research (PER) applies a scientific approach to the question, "How do our students think about and learn physics?" PER allows us to explore such intellectually engaging questions as, "What does it mean to understand…

We introduce a new paradigm of learning for reasoning, understanding, and prediction, as well as the scaffolding network to implement this paradigm. The scaffolding network embodies an incremental learning approach that is formulated as a…

Knowledge distillation is a simple but powerful way to transfer knowledge between a teacher model to a student model. Existing work suffers from at least one of the following key limitations in terms of direction and scope of transfer which…

The traditional approach to studying student understanding presents a question and uses the student answers to make inferences about their knowledge. However, this method does not capture the range of possible alternative ideas available to…

This paper studies the persuasion of a receiver who accesses information only if she exerts costly attention effort. A sender designs an experiment to persuade the receiver to take a specific action. The experiment affects the receiver's…

The ability to make decisions based on data, with its inherent uncertainties and variability, is a complex and vital skill in the modern world. The need for such quantitative critical thinking occurs in many different contexts, and while it…

Probability theory, epistemically interpreted, provides an excellent, if not the best available account of inductive reasoning. This is so because there are general and definite rules for the change of subjective probabilities through…

By 'informational entropy', we understand an inherent boundary to knowability, due e.g. to perceptual, theoretical, evidential or linguistic limits. In this paper, we discuss a logical framework in which this boundary is incorporated into…

What is information? Is it physical? We argue that in a Bayesian theory the notion of information must be defined in terms of its effects on the beliefs of rational agents. Information is whatever constrains rational beliefs and therefore…

Researchers in physics education have advocated both for including modeling in science classrooms as well as promoting student engagement with sensemaking. These two processes facilitate the generation of new knowledge by connecting to…

Rational speakers are supposed to know what they know and what they do not know, and to generate expressions matching the strength of evidence. In contrast, it is still a challenge for current large language models to generate corresponding…

A central challenge for cognitive science is to explain how abstract concepts are acquired from limited experience. This has often been framed in terms of a dichotomy between connectionist and symbolic cognitive models. Here, we highlight a…

This paper investigates the inherent knowledge in language models from the perspective of epistemological holism. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether LLMs exhibit characteristics consistent with epistemological holism. These…

Students' difficulties in quantum mechanics may be the result of unproductive framing and not a fundamental inability to solve the problems or misconceptions about physics content. We observed groups of students solving quantum mechanics…

Many science education researchers have argued that learners' commitment to a substance (matter-based) ontology impedes the learning of scientific concepts that scientists typically conceptualize as processes or interactions, such as such…

Scientists who study how the brain solves problems have recently verified that, because of stringent limitations in working memory, where the brain solves problems, students must apply facts and algorithms that have previously been well…

Large language models exhibit intelligence without genuine epistemic understanding, exposing a key gap: the absence of epistemic architecture. This paper introduces the Structured Cognitive Loop (SCL) as an executable epistemological…

Statistical thinking partially depends upon an iterative process by which essential features of a problem setting are identified and mapped onto an abstract model or archetype, and then translated back into the context of the original…

Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking can be relatively effortful. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate…

We consider the problem of communicating a sequence of concepts, i.e., unknown and potentially stochastic maps, which can be observed only through examples, i.e., the mapping rules are unknown. The transmitter applies a learning algorithm…