Related papers: Probing physics students' conceptual knowledge str…
Developing critical thinking skills is a common goal of an undergraduate physics curriculum. How do students make sense of evidence and what do they do with it? In this study, we evaluated students' critical thinking behaviors through their…
Interdisciplinary PhD programs can be challenging as the vital information needed by students may not be readily available, it is scattered across university's websites, while tacit knowledge can be obtained only by interacting with people.…
Meaning can be generated when information is related at a systemic level. Such a system can be an observer, but also a discourse, for example, operationalized as a set of documents. The measurement of semantics as similarity in patterns…
Background knowledge is typically needed for successful comprehension of topical and domain specific reading passages, such as in the STEM domain. However, there are few automated measures of student knowledge that can be readily deployed…
A survey was developed to probe student understanding of quantum mechanics at the beginning of graduate instruction. The survey was administered to 202 physics graduate students enrolled in first-year quantum mechanics courses from seven…
A prerequisite is anything that you need to know or understand first before attempting to learn or understand something new. In the current work, we present a method of finding prerequisite relations between concepts using related…
Researchers have argued against deficit-based explanations of students' troubles with mathematical sense-making, pointing instead to factors such as epistemology: students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning can hinder them…
We consider the case of a domain expert who wishes to explore the extent to which a particular idea is expressed in a text collection. We propose the task of semantically matching the idea, expressed as a natural language proposition,…
In recent years there has been growing evidence that even after teaching designed to address the learning difficulties dictated by literature, many physics learners fail to create the proper reasoning chains that connect the fundamental…
Uncertainty is an important and fundamental concept in physics education. Students are often first exposed to uncertainty in introductory labs, expand their knowledge across lab courses, and then are introduced to quantum mechanical…
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…
The process of constructing knowledge is typically taught to students by having them reproduce established results (e.g., homework problems). An alternative pedagogical strategy is to illustrate this process using an open problem, such as…
Measurement uncertainty plays a critical role in the process of experimental physics. It is useful to be able to assess student proficiency around the topic to iteratively improve instruction and student learning. For the topic of…
Scientific knowledge develops through cumulative discoveries that build on, contradict, contextualize, or correct prior findings. Scientists and journalists often communicate these incremental findings to lay people through visualizations…
Proficiency with calculating, reporting, and understanding measurement uncertainty is a nationally recognized learning outcome for undergraduate physics lab courses. The Physics Measurement Questionnaire (PMQ) is a research-based assessment…
We conducted an exploratory study in virtual reality to examine if people can discover causal relations in a realistic sensorimotor context and how such learning is represented at different processing levels (conscious-cognitive vs.…
For human beings, the processing of text streams of unknown size leads generally to problems because e.g. noise must be selected out, information be tested for its relevance or redundancy, and linguistic phenomenon like ambiguity or the…
This paper introduces a theory about the role of language in learning physics. The theory is developed in the context of physics students' and physicists' talking and writing about the subject of quantum mechanics. We found that physicists'…
Given that observational and numerical climate data are being produced at ever more prodigious rates, increasingly sophisticated and automated analysis techniques have become essential. Deep learning is quickly becoming a standard approach…
Information flow provides a natural measure for the causal interaction between dynamical events. This study extends our previous rigorous formalism of componentwise information flow to the bulk information flow between two complex…