Related papers: Probing physics students' conceptual knowledge str…
Educational research has shown that narratives are useful tools that can help young students make sense of scientific phenomena. Based on previous research, I argue that narratives can also become tools for high school students to make…
Current investigations into pedagogical goals of introductory algebra-based physics students at the University of Central Arkansas, by learning orientation towards an in-class metacognitive group problem solving task, seek to determine…
What kind of problem-solving instruction can help students apply what they have learned to solve the new and unfamiliar problems they will encounter in the future? We propose that mathematical sensemaking, the practice of seeking coherence…
The ability to categorize problems based upon underlying principles, rather than surface features or contexts, is considered one of several proxy predictors of expertise in problem solving. With inspiration from the classic study by Chi,…
A common hope of many physics educators and researchers is that students leave the course with a stronger sense that physics is relevant to them than when they entered the course. Multiple survey measures have attempted to measure shifts in…
Professional development workshops are commonly used to promote the adoption of research-based instructional strategies among physics and astronomy faculty. After learning about such strategies, faculty are often motivated to modify and…
Developing students' ability to troubleshoot is an important learning outcome for many undergraduate physics lab courses, especially electronics courses. In other work, metacognition has been identified as an important feature of…
Quantum mechanics is a challenging subject, even for advanced undergraduate and graduate students. Here, we discuss the development and evaluation of research-based concept tests for peer instruction as a formative assessment tool in…
We describe the development of a junior-senior level course for Physics majors designed to teach Mathematica skills in support of their undergraduate coursework, but also to introduce students to modern research level results. Standard…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by a variety of educators and physics education researchers. One reason for this extensive use is that many of the…
Prior research has shown that physics students often think about experimental procedures and data analysis very differently from experts. One key framework for analyzing student thinking has found that student thinking is more point-like,…
Student learning of sound waves can be helped through the creation of group-learning classroom materials whose development and design rely on explicit investigations into student understanding. We describe reasoning in terms of sets of…
Physics curricula across the US fail to prepare students adequately to solve problems, especially novel problems. A new curriculum, Matter and Interactions (M&I), was designed to improve student learning by organizing concepts around…
Students' attitudes and approaches to problem solving in physics can greatly impact their actual problem solving practices and also influence their motivation to learn and ultimately the development of expertise. We developed and validated…
It is quite exceptional, if it ever happens, that a new conceptual domain be built from scratch. Usually, it is developed and mastered in interaction, both positive and negative, with other more operational existing domains. Few reasoning…
Pre-college mathematics modeling instruction often frames mathematics as being separated from reasoning about the real world -- and commonly treats reasoning mathematically and reasoning about the real-world context as separate stages of a…
Recently, the National Research Council's framework for next generation science standards highlighted "computational thinking" as one of its "fundamental practices". 9th Grade students taking a physics course that employed the Modeling…
Researchers usually come up with new ideas only after thoroughly comprehending vast quantities of literature. The difficulty of this procedure is exacerbated by the fact that the number of academic publications is growing exponentially. In…
Upper-division physics students spend much of their time solving problems. In addition to their basic skills and background, their epistemic framing can form an important part of their ability to learn physics from these problems.…
This paper shows that, modern word embeddings contain information that distinguishes synonyms and antonyms despite small cosine similarities between corresponding vectors. This information is encoded in the geometry of the embeddings and…