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…

Understanding particle motion in force fields (PMFF), which encompasses the nature of forces and the relationship between force and motion, is fundamental to mastering mechanics and electromagnetism. Effectively solving PMFF-related problems requires advanced reasoning skills and the ability to apply knowledge across diverse contexts. Despite…

Introductory calculus-based mechanics ("Physics 1") is an important gateway course for students desiring to pursue a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) career. A major challenge with this course is the large spread in the students' incoming physics preparation. This level of preparation is strongly predictive of a…

One expected outcome of physics instruction is that students develop quantitative reasoning skills, including strategies for evaluating solutions to problems. Examples of well-known "canonical" evaluation strategies include special case analysis, unit analysis, and checking for reasonable numbers. We report on responses from three tasks…

Work and mechanical energy is a fundamental topic in introductory physics. Studies in existing literature have shown that students have difficulties in understanding work and mechanical energy, particularly the topic of work-energy theorem. To study students' knowledge integration in learning work and mechanical energy, a conceptual framework…

We use a validated conceptual multiple-choice survey instrument focusing on thermodynamic processes and the first and second laws of thermodynamics at the level of introductory physics to investigate the problem-property dependence of introductory and advanced student responses to introductory thermodynamics problems after traditional…

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection in Artificial Intelligence Tools in Physics Teaching and Physics Education Research.] We present a study in which a version of a common conservation of mechanical energy introductory physics problem, an object released on an inclined plane, is given to OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model (LLM). We…

In a typical first physics class, homework consists of problems in which numerical values for physical quantities are given and the desired answer is a number with appropriate units. In contrast, most calculations in upper-division undergraduate physics are entirely symbolic. Despite the need to learn symbolic manipulation, students are often…

A major goal of physics education is to develop strong problem-solving skills for students. To become expert problem solvers, students must have opportunities to deliberately practice those skills. In this work, we adopt a previously described definition of problem solving that consists of a set of 29 decisions made by expert scientists. We…

Over the course of the introductory calculus-based physics course, students are often expected to build conceptual understanding and develop and refine skills in problem solving and qualitative inferential reasoning. Many of the research-based materials developed over the past 30 years by the physics education research community use sequences of…

Students in introductory college physics often have wide ranges of preparation, making it challenging to deliver effective instruction for all. While numerous educational products and strategies have been shown to be broadly effective, there is a need for research-based online materials that support personalized learning and focus specifically on…

Previous work has looked at the relationship between high school preparation and student performance in calculus-based introductory mechanics (physics 1) courses. Here, we extend that work to look at performance in introductory calculus-based electricity and magnetism (physics 2), and we look at the significance of what college math courses have…

The law of conservation of momentum is a fundamental law of nature. It states that the momentum of an isolated system is conserved. In high school or introductory-level physics courses, for simplicity, teachers and textbooks always use collisions in one dimension as the examples to introduce the concept of conservation of momentum. To solve simple…

An important goal of introductory physics courses is to encourage effective approaches to problem solving. To achieve this goal, many aspects of desired problem solving approach should be rewarded, e.g. via grade incentives rather than basing grades mainly or solely on correct final answers. Here we discuss findings of a study that suggests that…

Solving problems is crucial for learning physics, and not only final solutions but also their derivations are important. Grading these derivations is labor intensive, as it generally involves human evaluation of handwritten work. AI tools have not been an alternative, since even for short answers, they needed specific training for each problem or…