Related papers: Designing Effective Questions for Classroom Respon…
Although an important goal of introductory physics labs is to train students in scientific reasoning and critical thinking, currently there are no standard tests in physics designed to assess such skills. We are in the process of developing…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a popular paradigm for addressing sequential decision tasks in which the agent has only limited environmental feedback. Despite many advances over the past three decades, learning in many domains still…
A difficult challenge in physics education is to design professional development programs for teachers, which can lead to fundamental changes in their practise. We report all activities for physics teachers in the context of the National…
Questions in causality, control, and reinforcement learning go beyond the classical machine learning task of prediction under i.i.d. observations. Instead, these fields consider the problem of learning how to actively perturb a system to…
End-of-course assessments play important roles in the ongoing attempt to improve instruction in physics courses. Comparison of students' performance on assessments before and after instruction gives a measure of student learning. In…
This study introduces Conversation Routines (CR), a structured prompt engineering framework for developing task-oriented dialog systems using Large Language Models (LLMs). While LLMs demonstrate remarkable natural language understanding…
Recommender systems (RSs) aim to help users to effectively retrieve items of their interests from a large catalogue. For a quite long period of time, researchers and practitioners have been focusing on developing accurate RSs. Recent years…
Scaling and sustaining educational innovations is a common problem in the learning sciences. Professional development resources around educational innovations that are personalized to appeal to the needs and motivations of different types…
What are the functions of curiosity? What are the mechanisms of curiosity-driven learning? We approach these questions about the living using concepts and tools from machine learning and developmental robotics. We argue that…
This study examines the impact of a remote laboratory experiment on Physics learning, using a case study approach. Societal advancements over the past century have spurred discussions regarding restructuring the current educational system,…
Safety is critical when applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems. As a result, safe RL has emerged as a fundamental and powerful paradigm for optimizing an agent's policy while incorporating notions of safety. A prevalent…
If students are to successfully grapple with authentic, complex biological problems as scientists and citizens, they need practice solving such problems during their undergraduate years. Physics education researchers have investigated…
Real-world decision-making tasks are generally complex, requiring trade-offs between multiple, often conflicting, objectives. Despite this, the majority of research in reinforcement learning and decision-theoretic planning either assumes…
Learning and teaching experiment was designed to incorporate SRS Student Response System to measure and assess student engagement in higher education for level 5 engineering students. The SRS system was based on getting an immediate student…
Acquiring the mathematical, conceptual, and problem-solving skills required in university-level physics courses is hard work, and the average student often lacks the knowledge and study skills they need to succeed in the introductory…
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is computationally challenging, with common approaches requiring the solution of multiple reinforcement learning (RL) sub-problems. This work motivates the use of potential-based reward shaping to reduce…
Our goal is a teachable reasoning system for question-answering (QA), where a user can interact with faithful answer explanations, and correct its errors so that the system improves over time. Our approach is to augment a QA model with a…
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) often leverage Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to adapt dynamically to changing environments and optimize performance. However, it is challenging to construct safety cases for RL components. We therefore…
Recent question generation (QG) approaches often utilize the sequence-to-sequence framework (Seq2Seq) to optimize the log-likelihood of ground-truth questions using teacher forcing. However, this training objective is inconsistent with…
Students' curiosity often seems nearly nonexistent in a lecture setting; we discuss a variety of possible reasons for this, but it is the instructor who typically poses questions while only a few students, usually the better ones, respond.…