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Asking questions is one of the most crucial pedagogical techniques used by teachers in class. It not only offers open-ended discussions between teachers and students to exchange ideas but also provokes deeper student thought and critical…
Science communication skills are considered essential learning objectives for undergraduate physics students. However, high enrollment and limited class resources present significant barriers to providing students ample opportunities to…
Problem solving is central to physics instruction. Results from Physics Education Research (PER), however, demonstrate that traditional ways of teaching with problem solving are inefficient and ineffective for promoting true physics…
Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to…
Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) actively elicit user preferences to generate adaptive recommendations. Mainstream reinforcement learning-based CRS solutions heavily rely on handcrafted reward functions, which may not be aligned…
Deep reinforcement learning has been recognized as an efficient technique to design optimal strategies for different complex systems without prior knowledge of the control landscape. To achieve a fast and precise control for quantum…
With the introduction of educational robotics (ER) and computational thinking (CT) in classrooms, there is a rising need for operational models that help ensure that CT skills are adequately developed. One such model is the Creative…
Teaching Robotics is about empowering students to create and configure robotics devices and program computers to nurture in students the skill sets necessary to play an active role in society. The robot in Figure 1 focuses on the design of…
Our main goal is to develop plans to increase physics enrollment. Once again we thoroughly analyze the problem from the beginning and reach the conclusion that the most appropriate starting point in this direction should be to look into…
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend suitable items to users through natural language conversations. For developing effective CRSs, a major technical issue is how to accurately infer user preference from very limited…
Automated methods are becoming increasingly integrated into studies of formative feedback on students' science explanation writing. Most of this work, however, addresses students' responses to short answer questions. We investigate…
Controllable text generation (CTG) by large language models has a huge potential to transform education for teachers and students alike. Specifically, high quality and diverse question generation can dramatically reduce the load on teachers…
Effective physics learning, especially in complex topics, requires balancing mathematical formalism with conceptual understanding. Conceptual problem-solving involves connecting math to physical reality, and using an epistemological…
NLP-powered automatic question generation (QG) techniques carry great pedagogical potential of saving educators' time and benefiting student learning. Yet, QG systems have not been widely adopted in classrooms to date. In this work, we aim…
Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…
Smart Reply (SR) systems present a user with a set of replies, of which one can be selected in place of having to type out a response. To perform well at this task, a system should be able to effectively present the user with a diverse set…
Reasoning large language models (LLMs) excel in complex tasks, which has drawn significant attention to reinforcement learning (RL) for LLMs. However, existing approaches allocate an equal number of rollouts to all questions during the RL…
Quiz design is a tedious process that teachers undertake to evaluate the acquisition of knowledge by students. Our goal in this paper is to automate quiz composition from a set of multiple choice questions (MCQs). We formalize a generic…
We investigated the effects of student-generated problems on exams. The process was gradual with some training throughout the semester. Initial results were highly positive with the students involved performing significantly better, and…
Experimental activities are an essential part of physics education. In addition to conveying scientific knowledge, they play a significant role in developing scientific literacy, inquiry skills, and critical thinking. In today's world,…