Evaluating Item Difficulty Patterns for Assessing Student Misconceptions in Science Across Physics, Chemistry, and Biology Concepts

Density functional theory across chemistry, physics and biology.

The past decades have seen density functional theory (DFT) evolve from a rising star in computational quantum chemistry to one of its major players. This Theme Issue, which comes half a century after the publication of the Hohenberg-Kohn theorems that laid the foundations of modern DFT, reviews progress and challenges in present-day DFT research. Rather than trying to be comprehensive, this The...

Identifying science concepts and student misconceptions in an interactive essay writing tutor

We present initial steps towards an interactive essay writing tutor that improves science knowledge by analyzing student essays for misconceptions and recommending science webpages that help correct those misconceptions. We describe the five components in this system: identifying core science concepts, determining appropriate pedagogical sequences for the science concepts, identifying student m...

Physics, biology and the right chemistry

Joint studies that involve biologists and physicists are becoming more frequent and have contributed to the identification and understanding of physical parameters underlying key biological processes. Here, we illustrate the main findings resulting from a 10-year collaboration between a cell biologist and an experimental physicist, both interested in the mechanisms of intracellular transport an...

Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology

Physics, chemistry and biology of functional nanostructures

Nanoscience emerged as a field addressing phenomena that are strongly related to and influenced by their length scale being in the nanometer range. From the very beginning its interdisciplinary character became obvious. Meanwhile, after nanoscience had left its infancy, this characteristic feature developed even further by extension of the contributing disciplines: Initially it was supported an...