Related papers: Designing Effective Questions for Classroom Respon…

Among the many decisions to be made in their teaching practice, physics teachers must decide how to explain each particular phenomenon to students. This study explores student teachers' (STs) decision-making process when presented with…

In Conversational Recommendation System (CRS), an agent is asked to recommend a set of items to users within natural language conversations. To address the need for both conversational capability and personalized recommendations, prior…

I am a second-year cognitive science major, and as a student who has completed my physical science distribution requirements, I will likely never again encounter Gauss's law. So why do I feel that the time and effort I devoted to solving…

Designing a one-hour unit test for an introductory physics class can be quite challenging. We present an efficient format of a one-hour unit test that utilizes question groups for quantitative free-response problems and a binary system…

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems can be challenging without well-shaped rewards. Prior work on provably efficient RL methods generally proposes to address this issue with dedicated exploration strategies. However, another way to tackle…

While Large Language Models (LLMs) are often used as virtual tutors in computer science (CS) education, this approach can foster passive learning and over-reliance. This paper presents a novel pedagogical paradigm that inverts this model:…

Grading can shape students' learning and encourage use of effective problem solving practices. Teaching assistants (TAs) are often responsible for grading student solutions and providing feedback, thus, their perceptions of grading may…

The core of scientific research is turning new ideas into reality. From the school science fair to the search for the secrets of dark energy, high-quality research consists of scientific investigation constrained within the scope of a…

We redesigned an advanced physics laboratory course to include a project component. The intention was to address learning outcomes such as modeling, design of experiments, teamwork, and developing technical skills in using apparatus and…

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) have become crucial emerging research topics in the field of RSs, thanks to their natural advantages of explicitly acquiring user preferences via interactive conversations and revealing the reasons…

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to capture user's current intentions and provide recommendations through real-time multi-turn conversational interactions. As a human-machine interactive system, it is essential for CRS to…

Intelligent and adaptive online education systems aim to make high-quality education available for a diverse range of students. However, existing systems usually depend on a pool of hand-made questions, limiting how fine-grained and…

Human creativity is a multifaceted phenomenon with cognitive, attitudinal, intrapersonal interpersonal, practical, socio-cultural, economic, and environmental aspects. It can be challenging to incorporate creativity in classrooms. Teachers…

In education, open-ended quiz questions have become an important tool for assessing the knowledge of students. Yet, manually preparing such questions is a tedious task, and thus automatic question generation has been proposed as a possible…

We present a study of active learning pedagogies in an upper division physics course. This work was guided by the principle of deliberate practice for the development of expertise, and this principle was used in the design of the materials…

We discuss several ways of illustrating fundamental concepts in statistical and thermal physics by considering various models and algorithms. We emphasize the importance of replacing students' incomplete mental images by models that are…

We believe that economists have much to learn from educational research practices and related pedagogical innovations in other disciplines, in particular physics education. In this paper we identify three key features of physics education…

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Conversational recommendation system (CRS) is able to obtain fine-grained and dynamic user preferences based on interactive dialogue. Previous CRS assumes that the user has a clear target item. However, for many users who resort to CRS,…

Responsive teaching is a highly effective strategy that promotes student learning. In math classrooms, teachers might "funnel" students towards a normative answer or "focus" students to reflect on their own thinking, deepening their…