Related papers: Designing Effective Questions for Classroom Respon…
Common research tasks ask students to identify a correct answer and justify their answer choice. We propose expanding the array of research tasks to access different knowledge that students might have. By asking students to discuss answers…
Real-time control for robotics is a popular research area in the reinforcement learning community. Through the use of techniques such as reward shaping, researchers have managed to train online agents across a multitude of domains. Despite…
Analyzing students' written solutions to physics questions is a major area in PER. However, gauging student understanding in college courses is bottlenecked by large class sizes, which limits assessments to a multiple-choice (MC) format for…
Curriculum reinforcement learning (CRL) improves the learning speed and stability of an agent by exposing it to a tailored series of tasks throughout learning. Despite empirical successes, an open question in CRL is how to automatically…
As part of large-scale assessment project at Texas Tech University, we studied the effect of problem format on students responses to quiz questions. The same problem was written in multiple formats and administered as a quiz in the large…
Question generation (QG) is a natural language processing task with an abundance of potential benefits and use cases in the educational domain. In order for this potential to be realized, QG systems must be designed and validated with…
Despite significant progress in a variety of vision-and-language problems, developing a method capable of asking intelligent, goal-oriented questions about images is proven to be an inscrutable challenge. Towards this end, we propose a Deep…
Conversational recommender systems (CRS) are interactive agents that support their users in recommendation-related goals through multi-turn conversations. Generally, a CRS can be evaluated in various dimensions. Today's CRS mainly rely on…
Research on reasoning in language models (LMs) predominantly focuses on improving the correctness of their outputs. But some important applications require modeling reasoning patterns that are incorrect. For example, automated systems that…
Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are widely used in digital learning systems, as they allow for automating the assessment process. However, due to the increased digital literacy of students and the advent of social media platforms, MCQ…
Robotic systems are more present in our society everyday. In human-robot environments, it is crucial that end-users may correctly understand their robotic team-partners, in order to collaboratively complete a task. To increase action…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved tremendous development in recent years, but still faces significant obstacles in addressing complex real-life problems due to the issues of poor system generalization, low sample efficiency as well…
Case-oriented physics education research - which seeks to refine and develop theory by linking that theory to cases - incorporates distinct practices for selecting data for analysis, generalizing results, and making causal claims.…
Studying for physics exams can be difficult and stressful, especially during a student's introductory year in physics. For students who do not plan to major in physics, the desire to do well is based less on understanding concepts and more…
One finding of cognitive research is that people do not automatically acquire usable knowledge by spending lots of time on task. Because students' knowledge hierarchy is more fragmented, "knowledge chunks" are smaller than those of experts.…
In order to describe natural phenomena, science develops sophisticated models that use mathematical and formal languages which seem, and often are, very far from common experience. When a phenomenon is not accessible to our senses, its…
When deploying online homework in physics courses, an important consideration is how many attempts should be allowed in order to solve numerical free-response problems. While on the one hand, the maximum number of attempts should be large…
Teaching physics in real-life contexts continues to be a challenge for teachers at different educational levels. In this article, three Context-Rich Problems are proposed to be implemented in the classroom for higher education, using the…
Many physics instructors aim to support student sensemaking in their classrooms. However, this can be challenging since instances of sensemaking tend to be short-lived, with students often defaulting to approaches based on answer-making or…
Learning physics is a context dependent process. I consider a broader interdisciplinary problem of where differences in understanding and reasoning arise. I suggest the long run effects a multiple choice based learning system as well as…