Related papers: Measuring and modeling physics students' conceptua…
Traditional tests are not effective tools for diagnosing the content and structure of students' knowledge of physics. As a possible alternative, a set of term-association tasks (the "ConMap" tasks) was developed to probe the…
Questions of participant understanding of the nature of an activity have been addressed in anthropology and sociolinguistics with the concepts of frames and framing. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for…
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…
Conceptual tests are widely used by physics instructors to assess students' conceptual understanding and compare teaching methods. It is common to look at students' changes in their answers between a pre-test and a post-test to quantify a…
The ability to make decisions based on data, with its inherent uncertainties and variability, is a complex and vital skill in the modern world. The need for such quantitative critical thinking occurs in many different contexts, and while it…
In a recent report, the American Association of Physics Teachers has developed an updated set of recommendations for curriculum of undergraduate physics labs.1 This document focuses on six major themes: constructing knowledge, modeling,…
The cyclic format of the undergraduate physics curriculum depends on students' ability to recall and utilize material covered in prior courses in order to reliably build on that knowledge in later courses. However, there is evidence to…
Statistical thinking partially depends upon an iterative process by which essential features of a problem setting are identified and mapped onto an abstract model or archetype, and then translated back into the context of the original…
Item Response Theory (IRT) is a popular assessment method used in education measurement, which builds on an assumption of a probability framework connecting students' innate ability and their actual performances on test items. The model…
Integrating computation into physics teaching is a curricular move that, at present, has been predominately studied for its cognitive impacts. However, if this modality of instruction shifts how students engage with physics, we argue there…
As the field of quantum physics evolves, researchers naturally form subgroups focusing on specialized problems. While this encourages in-depth exploration, it can limit the exchange of ideas across structurally similar problems in different…
This study used eye-tracking to capture the students' visual attention while taking the test of understanding graphs in kinematics (TUG-K). A total of N = 115 upper-secondary-level students from Germany and Switzerland took the 26-item…
The current paper examines the possibility of replacing conventional synchronous single-attempt exam with more flexible and accessible multi-attempt asynchronous assessments in introductory-level physics by using large isomorphic problem…
This paper introduces a testable model for physics-specific student engagement at the onset of task processing in response to a task-specific motivational stimulus. Empirical research provides evidence that contextual embedding of a task…
Assessments are usually thought of as ways for instructors to get information from students. In this work, we flip this perspective and explore how assessments communicate information to students. Specifically, we consider how assessments…
The activation of scientific concepts (such as association) is not only an important way for children to organize scientific knowledges, but also an important way for them to learn complex concepts (such as compound concepts composed of…
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,…
This paper introduces a new spreadsheet tool for adoption by high school or college level physics teachers who use common assessments in a pre-instruction/post-instruction mode to diagnose student learning and teaching effectiveness. The…
A partially unusual behaviour was found among 14 sophomore students of civil engineering who took a pre test for a free fall laboratory session, in the context of a general mechanics course. An analysis contemplating mathematics models and…
Learning is a physical process. Here, we aim to study a simple dynamical system composed of springs and sticks capable of arbitrarily approximating any continuous function. The main idea of our work is to use the sticks to mimic a…