Related papers: Measuring and modeling physics students' conceptua…
The Energy and Momentum Conceptual Survey (EMCS) is a multiple-choice survey that contains conceptual problems involving a variety of energy and momentum concepts covered in a typical introductory physics course for science and engineering…
With the recent surge in personalized learning, Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) that can accurately track students' individual knowledge states and provide tailored learning paths based on this information are in demand as an essential…
In many autonomy applications, performance of perception algorithms is important for effective planning and control. In this paper, we introduce a framework for computing the probability of satisfaction of formal system specifications given…
We propose TRACIE, a novel temporal reasoning dataset that evaluates the degree to which systems understand implicit events -- events that are not mentioned explicitly in natural language text but can be inferred from it. This introduces a…
Complex networks have been found to provide a good representation of the structure of knowledge, as understood in terms of discoverable concepts and their relationships. In this context, the discovery process can be modeled as agents…
Model-based reinforcement learning refers to a set of approaches capable of sample-efficient decision making, which create an explicit model of the environment. This model can subsequently be used for learning optimal policies. In this…
This study investigates differences in student responses to in-class and online administrations of the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), Conceptual Survey of Electricity and Magnetism (CSEM), and the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science…
Traditional high-stakes summative assessments--timed, in-class exams accounting for a large percentage of the term's overall grade--have often received criticism from the educational community. Such assessments tend to prize a particular…
We demonstrate that the information contained in the spike occurrence times of a population of neurons can be broken up into a series of terms, each of which reflect something about potential coding mechanisms. This is possible in the…
The increased use of multiple-choice (MC) questions in introductory-level physics final exams is largely hindered by reservations about its ability to test the broad cognitive domain that is routinely accessed with typical…
The research presented in this thesis was motivated by the need to improve introductory physics courses. Introductory physics courses are generally the first courses in which students learn to create models to solve complex problems.…
Relational thinking refers to the inherent ability of humans to form mental impressions about relations between sensory signals and prior knowledge, and subsequently incorporate them into their model of their world. Despite the crucial role…
This paper presents the first item response theory (IRT) analysis of the national data set on introductory, general education, college-level astronomy teaching using the Light and Spectroscopy Concept Inventory (LSCI). We used the…
Spike synchrony, which occurs in various cortical areas in response to specific perception, action and memory tasks, has sparked a long-standing debate on the nature of temporal organization in cortex. One prominent view is that this type…
Millions of online discussions are generated everyday on social media platforms. Topic modelling is an efficient way of better understanding large text datasets at scale. Conventional topic models have had limited success in online…
Developing expertise in physics entails learning to use mathematics effectively and efficiently as applied to the context of physical situations. Doing so involves coordinating a variety of concepts and skills including mathematical…
Meaning may arise from an element's role or interactions within a larger system. For example, hitting nails is more central to people's concept of a hammer than its particular material composition or other intrinsic features. Likewise, the…
Knowing the precise format of a program's input is a necessary prerequisite for systematic testing. Given a program and a small set of sample inputs, we (1) track the data flow of inputs to aggregate input fragments that share the same data…
Closure modeling - the statistical modeling of missing dynamics in the natural sciences and engineering - is a growing and active area of research. Existing methods for closure modeling are often computationally prohibitive, lack…
Many physics instructors aim to support student sensemaking in their classrooms. However, this can be challenging since instances of sensemaking tend to be short-lived, with students often defaulting to approaches based on answer-making or…