Physics Education Research (PER) has grown since its beginning. To see where the field is now and how it has changed, we have applied text embeddings and centroids to categorise all papers in Physical Review Physics Education Research into two sets of researcher defined topics. Previous work with centroids and embeddings has had no reproducible way of tuning a key parameter when using a Boltzmann distribution to categorize papers. We present one way to tune this parameter using Jensen-Shannon divergence. We also expand on this method by applying anti-centroids to remove papers that do not fit into our set of categories. This enables us to combine the benefit of the human researcher with the scaling potential of computers.
We will serve refreshments, coffee and tea. Welcome!
The bi-weekly ODD seminar series at CCSE
The Open Discussions on Didactics (ODD) is a seminar series usually on Thursdays at 13:00-14:00 every other week (odd week numbers) at CCSE.
The seminar will be maximum one hour and is an informal arena to present and discuss learning theory, educational research and teaching experiences within computational science. To cater to the highly heterogeneous backgrounds and interests of students, teachers and researchers in our environment, we aim for seminars that introduce participants to new ideas within a broad spectrum of educational topics, and that invites reflection and discussion.
Presentations need not be mature and polished – on the contrary, we hope that as many as possible wants to share undigested observations and reflections in short presentations of varied form and topics. We hope to have enough contributions to frequently have the meetings as lightning talk sessions, where three different speakers will each give a 5-10-minute presentation followed by discussion.