There have been several attempts to conceptualize and operationalize pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in the context of teachers' professional competencies. A recent and popular model is the Refined Consensus Model (RCM), which proposes a framework of dispositional competencies (personal PCK--pPCK) that influence more action-related…

Clustering methods are often used in physics education research (PER) to identify subgroups of individuals within a population who share similar response patterns or characteristics. Among these, k-means (or k-modes, for categorical data) is one of the most commonly used clustering methods in PER. This algorithm, however, is distance-based rather…

A common diagnosis in the literature is that the writing of Spanish speakers is generally a structural problem. The writing of 81 university students was analysed by classifying the teacher's comments based on 11 variables that were recorded once during a continuous evaluation that supported the assessment. The techniques used were Content…

The main goal of learning analytics and early detection systems is to extract knowledge from student data to understand students' trends of activities towards success and risk and design intervention methods to improve learning performance and experience. However, many factors contribute to the challenge of designing and building effective…

The Elo rating system has been recognised as an effective method for modelling students and items within adaptive educational systems. The existing Elo-based models have the limiting assumption that items are only tagged with a single concept and are mainly studied in the context of adaptive testing systems. In this paper, we introduce a…

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is the analysis of the evolution of students' satisfaction over time in a large Italian university and the effects on it because of some characteristics of the teachers: didactic practices, beliefs and needs with regard to teaching and learning. Design/methodology/approach: The first step of the analysis…

The distributed practice effect suggests that students retain learning content better when they pace their practice over time. The key factors are practice dosage (intensity) and timing (when to practice and how in between). Inspired by the thriving development of image recognition, this study adopts one of the successful techniques,…

The Major Field Test in Business (MFTB) is a nationally administered student evaluation that measures the accumulated knowledge of undergraduates enrolled in a four-year degree program. Research to date has focused primarily on understanding how different variables correlate with performance on this standardized test -- such as student grades,…

Principal component analysis is an important statistical technique for dimension reduction and exploratory data analysis. However, it is not robust to outliers and may obfuscate important data structure such as clustering. We propose a version of principal component analysis based on the robust L2E method. The technique seeks to find the principal…

Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), institutions that enroll at least 25% Hispanic students, are institutionally diverse, including a much wider array of institutional types than other Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs). Furthermore, they have distinctive institutional characteristics from those typically emphasized in institutional typologies…

Since Accumulated Grad-Point Average (AGPA) is crucial in the professional life of students, it is an interesting and challenging problem to create profiles for those students who are likely to graduate with low AGPA. Identifying this kind of students accurately will enable the university staff to help them improve their ability by providing them…

In our everyday life, we often need to anticipate the potential occurrence of events and their consequences. In this context, the way we represent contingencies can determine our ability to adapt to the environment. However, it is not clear how agents encode and organize available knowledge about the future to react to possible states of the…

Students' mental models of diffusion in a gas phase solution were studied through the use of the Structure and Motion of Matter (SAMM) survey. This survey permits identification of categories of ways students think about the structure of the gaseous solute and solvent, the origin of motion of gas particles, and trajectories of solute particles in…

Although used frequently in related fields such as K-12 education research, educational psychology, sociology, and social survey research, latent class analysis (LCA) has been infrequently used in higher education. This article provides higher education researchers with a pedagogical application of LCA to classify entering freshmen based on their…

The present study used the Cognitive Reconstruction of Knowledge Model (CRKM) model of conceptual change as a framework for developing and testing how key cognitive, motivational, and emotional variables are linked to conceptual change in physics. This study extends an earlier study developed by Taasoobshirazi and Sinatra ("J Res Sci…