Related papers: Measuring and modeling physics students' conceptua…
Equations are about more than computing physical quantities or constructing formal models; they are also about understanding. The conceptual systems physicists use to think about nature are made from many different resources, formal and…
We investigate student understanding of energy and momentum concepts at the level of introductory physics by designing and administering a 25-item multiple choice test and conducting individual interviews. We find that most students have…
The Force Concept Inventory (FCI) has been widely used to assess student understanding of introductory mechanics concepts by educators and physics education researchers. Many of the items on the FCI have strong distractor choices…
We investigate the dynamics of student behaviors (posture, gesture, vocal register, visual focus) and the substance of their reasoning during collaborative work on inquiry-based physics tutorials. Scherr has characterized student activity…
Traditionally, scholars in physics education research pay attention to students solving well-structured learning activities, which provide restricted room for collaboration and idea-generation due to their close-ended nature. In order to…
Topology of urban environments can be represented by means of graphs. We explore the graph representations of several compact urban patterns by random walks. The expected time of recurrence and the expected first passage time to a node…
It is commonly assumed that a specific testing occasion (task, design, procedure, etc.) provides insights that generalise beyond that occasion. This assumption is infrequently carefully tested in data. We develop a statistically principled…
Assessing student learning is a cornerstone of educational practice. Standardized assessments have played a significant role in the development of instruction, curricula, and educational spaces in college physics. However, the use of these…
This paper aims to share the use of Tracker a free open source video analysis and modeling tool that is increasingly used as a pedagogical tool for the effective learning and teaching of Physics for Grade 9 Secondary 3 students in Singapore…
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…
As part of a large-scale assessment project at a large university, we administered weekly pre-tests and bi-weekly post-tests in the recitation sections of our introductory classes over four semesters from Spring 2010 through Fall 2011. The…
Understanding the interaction patterns among simultaneous recordings of spike trains from multiple neuronal units is a key topic in neuroscience. However, an optimal approach of assessing these interactions has not been established, as…
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…
Student performance of virtual introductory physics class (calculus-based mechanics) is analyzed. A fully web-enhanced class was done synchronously. The analysis is done in two categories, averaging all mid-exams (or chapter exams) and…
We discuss research involving the Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM) to evaluate one aspect of the pedagogical content knowledge of teaching assistants (TAs): the knowledge of introductory students' alternate conceptions…
Item response theory (IRT) models have been widely used in educational measurement testing. When there are repeated observations available for individuals through time, a dynamic structure for the latent trait of ability needs to be…
Tasks that require information about the world imply a trade-off between the time spent on observation and the variance of the response. In particular, fast decisions need to rely on uncertain information. However, standard estimates of…
We report on progress towards the development of an Action Concept Inventory (ACI), a test that measures student understanding of action principles in introductory mechanics and optics. The ACI also covers key concepts of many-paths quantum…
The Physics Lab Inventory of Critical Thinking (PLIC) measures three components of students' critical thinking in physics labs: evaluating data, evaluating methods, and proposing next steps. Prior work has analyzed these components in…
This study discusses an alternative tool for modeling student assessment data. The model constructs networks from a matrix item responses and attempts to represent these data in low dimensional Euclidean space. This procedure has advantages…