Mindset is a construct of interest for challenging learning environments, as science courses often are, in that, it has implications for behavioral responses to academic challenges. Previous work examining mindset in science learning contexts has been primarily quantitative in nature, limiting the theoretical basis for mindset perspectives…

Use of online video lectures is increasingly common. However, students may struggle to self-regulate their attention and passively process the content. This study examined whether, and for whom, different types of embedded learning prompts improve student learning from video lectures. Undergraduate physics students (N = 253) watched an online,…

For nearly two decades, augmented reality (AR) has found diverse applications in education, particularly in science education, where its efficacy has been supported by relevant theories and many empirical studies. However, previous studies have revealed the following research deficit: While AR technology appears to influence learning-related…

Combining mathematical and physical understanding in reasoning is difficult, and a growing body of research shows that students experience problems with the combination of physics and mathematics in reasoning beyond the introductory level. We investigated students' reasoning about boundary conditions (BCs) for the diffusion equation by conducting…

There are conditions that lead professors to use different text formats in quantum physics courses. Studying these conditions is an important aspect to understand the dynamics of physics pedagogy, and philosophy of science can be used as an orientation to do so. A case study was conducted at a Brazilian initial physics teacher training program.…

Purpose: As online course enrollments increase, it is important to understand how common course features influence students' behaviors and performance. Asynchronous online courses often include a discussion forum to promote community through interaction between students and instructors. Students interact both socially and cognitively; instructors'…

Short metacognitive prompts--like "minute papers"--are simple enough to be widely adopted by instructors. But do they work? We investigate how they affect college students' performance in quantitative (Physics) and qualitative (Psychology) courses, comparing classes which received metacognitive prompts to those that did not. We find…

Accuracy on assessments is commonly studied in education research but response time (RT) is relatively less investigated even though decades of research in cognitive sciences indicate that time can be an important dimension for understanding student learning. To better understand RT and the potentially important relations between accuracy and RT…

Contextual features of assessments can influence the ideas students draw from and the ways they assemble knowledge. We used a mixed-methods approach to explore how surface-level item context impacts student reasoning. In study 1, we developed an isomorphic survey to capture student reasoning about fluid dynamics, a crosscutting phenomenon, in two…

Self-explanation, a learning strategy where students explain to themselves the steps taken in a worked example, is an effective learning strategy in early cognitive skill acquisition. However, many physics students produce self-explanations of low quality. There is also a lack of guidelines for what students should seek to explain when studying…

Even after research-based instruction, students who demonstrate the ability to assemble relevant conceptual knowledge on one physics question may have difficulty assembling that same knowledge on a closely related problem. Recent research has suggested that reflexive, bottom-up reasoning processes seemingly unrelated to the physics concepts…

As mobile learning (ML) becomes more and more popular, teaching methods are gradually adapting to flipped classrooms or micro-flipped classrooms. Many studies have discussed the influence of ML-based flipped classrooms on students' learning in a macroscopic way. However, at the micro-level, the impact of these classrooms on students' emotional…

Cognitive neuroscience methods can identify the fMRI-measured neural representation of familiar individual concepts, such as apple, and decompose them into meaningful neural and semantic components. This approach was applied here to determine the neural representations and underlying dimensions of representation of far more abstract physics…

The study focuses on assessing the proficiency levels of higher education students, specifically the physics achievement test (PHY 101) at the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN). This test, like others, evaluates various aspects of knowledge and skills simultaneously. However, relying on traditional models for such tests can result in…

After targeted instruction designed to improve student conceptual understanding of physics, a significant fraction of students are not able to answer many questions in a consistent manner. Prior research suggests that even those students who demonstrate that they acquired the relevant knowledge and skills (i.e., possess the requisite…