Related papers: Limitations in predicting student performance on s…
Investigations related to expertise in problem solving and ability to transfer learning from one context to another are important for developing strategies to help students perform more expert-like tasks. Here we analyze written responses…
We examine a measure of individual student gain by preservice elementary teachers, related to Richard Hakes use of mean gain in the study of reform classes in undergraduate physics. The gain statistic assesses the amount individual students…
Recent and influential critiques of standardized testing have noted the existence of non-trivial numbers of successful scientists who received low scores on the GRE. Here we use computer simulations to show that the prevalence of such…
We review the literature on the gender gap on concept inventories in physics. Across studies of the most commonly used mechanics concept inventories, the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) and Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE), mens…
Physics Education Research (PER) practitioners have engaged in substantial curriculum development and dissemination work in recent years. Yet, it appears that this work has had minimal influence on the fundamental teaching practices of…
High-stakes exams play a large role in determining an introductory physics student's final grade. These exams have been shown to be inequitable, often to the detriment of students identifying with groups historically marginalized in…
We present a method for incorporating a stochastic point of view into physics exercises of mathematics education. The core of our method is the randomization of some inputs, the system model used does not differ from what we would use in…
Precision electroweak data allow one to test the standard model, constrain its parameters, and search for the effects of some kinds of new physics. The results of the most recent data from LEP, SLC, and elsewhere are described, as are their…
Traditional high-stakes summative assessments--timed, in-class exams accounting for a large percentage of the term's overall grade--have often received criticism from the educational community. Such assessments tend to prize a particular…
The Mathematization project investigates students' use of mathematical tools across the undergraduate physics curriculum. As a part of this project, we look at intermediate mechanics students' written homework solutions to understand how…
We analyze the effectiveness of working in pairs on the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism test in a calculus-based introductory physics course. Students who collaborated with a peer showed significantly larger normalized gain…
In response to national calls to better align physics laboratory courses with the way physicists engage in research, we have developed an epistemology and expectations survey to assess how students perceive the nature of physics experiments…
Accurate and computationally-viable representations of clouds and turbulence are a long-standing challenge for climate model development. Traditional parameterizations that crudely but efficiently approximate these processes are a leading…
When considering performing an Introductory Physics for Life Sciences course transformation for one's own institution, life science majors' achievement goals are a necessary consideration to ensure the pedagogical transformation will be…
A major challenge in physics-informed machine learning is to understand how the incorporation of prior domain knowledge affects learning rates when data are dependent. Focusing on empirical risk minimization with physics-informed…
We investigate student understanding of energy and momentum concepts at the level of introductory physics by designing and administering a 25-item multiple choice test and conducting individual interviews. We find that most students have…
This article describes five common student misconceptions about succeeding in college-level Physics courses: the miracle finish, the soft hearted professor, an extension of high school, weak areas won't be tested, and passing is more…
The many metrics employed for the evaluation of search engine results have not themselves been conclusively evaluated. We propose a new measure for a metric's ability to identify user preference of result lists. Using this measure, we…
Predicting the performance of students early and as accurately as possible is one of the biggest challenges of educational institutions. Analyzing the performance of students early can help in finding the strengths and weakness of students…
Ensuring safety under unknown and stochastic dynamics remains a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL). In this paper, we propose a model predictive control (MPC)-based safe RL framework, called Probabilistic Ensembles with…