Related papers: Measuring and modeling physics students' conceptua…
Most educational literature on conceptual change concerns the process by which introductory students acquire scientific knowledge. However, with modern developments in science and technology, the social significance of learning successive…
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…
Development of conceptual multiple-choice tests related to a particular physics topic is important for designing research-based learning tools to reduce the difficulties. We explore the difficulties that the advanced undergraduate and…
Understanding texts requires memory: the reader has to keep in mind enough words to create meaning. This calls for a relation between the memory of the reader and the structure of the text. To investigate this interaction, we first identify…
Modeling the creative mathematical sensemaking that characterizes expert thinking in physics is typically a struggle for new learners. To help students learn to reason this way, we created a set of supplemental activities called Physics…
Effective physics learning, especially in complex topics, requires balancing mathematical formalism with conceptual understanding. Conceptual problem-solving involves connecting math to physical reality, and using an epistemological…
We present the mathematical basis of a new approach to the analysis of temporal coding. The foundation of the approach is the construction of several families of novel distances (metrics) between neuronal impulse trains. In contrast to most…
Calls to transform introductory college physics courses to include scientific practices require assessments that can measure the extent to which these transformations are effective. Such assessments should be able to measure students'…
Understanding a complex system entails capturing the non-trivial collective phenomena that arise from interactions between its different parts. Information theory is a flexible and robust framework to study such behaviours, with several…
Physics education researchers have developed many evidence-based instructional strategies to enhance physics students' conceptual learning. These strategies have historically been tested using assessments such as the Force Concept Inventory…
Tracing a student's knowledge growth given the past exercise answering is a vital objective in automatic tutoring systems to customize the learning experience. Yet, achieving this objective is a non-trivial task as it involves modeling the…
Free association is a task that requires a subject to express the first word to come to their mind when presented with a certain cue. It is a task which can be used to expose the basic mechanisms by which humans connect memories. In this…
This paper reports on an investigation into the correlations between students' understandings of introductory astronomy concepts and the correctness and coherency of their written responses to targeted Lecture-Tutorial questions. We…
This study examines whether including more contextual information in data analysis could improve our ability to identify the relation between students' online learning behavior and overall performance in an introductory physics course. We…
There is some evidence that conceptual inquiry-based introductory physics lab curricula, such as RealTime Physics, may improve students' understanding of physics concepts. Thus, these curricula may be attractive for instructors who seek to…
Researchers working within knowledge-in-pieces traditions have often employed observational approaches to investigate micro-processes of learning. There is growing evidence from this line of work that students' intuitive thinking about…
Over the past several decades, a large body of research has shown that undergraduate science students learn more and more equitably in active learning classrooms; however, the term "active learning" lacks definition and little research has…
This article proposes a formal rapprochement between cognitive load theory and embodied cognition by reconceptualizing psychological representations as dynamic multiscale attractors within a temporal-hierarchical prediction architecture.…
In this paper we present a method of modeling and analysis that permits the extraction and quantitative display of detailed information about the effects of instruction on a class's knowledge. The method relies on a congitive model that…
The current work aims to better understand student course experiences for those who reported negative perceptions in introductory physics. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 24 students who reported negative perceptions of their…