CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY -
UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH

Monday, July 6, 2009, Astro Coffee, 2:00 PM, 416 Allen Hall, PITT

Tuesday, July 7, 2009, Doctoral Defense, Andrew Mason, “Reflection on Problem Solving”, 2:00 PM, 318 Allen Hall, PITT.

Abstract:  Reflection is essential in order to learn from problem solving. This thesis explores issues related to how reflective students are and how we can improve their capacity for reflection on problem solving. In particular, we investigate how students naturally reflect in their physics courses about problem solving and evaluate strategies that may teach them reflection as an integral component of problem-solving. Asking students to categorize problems based upon similarity of solution is a strategy to help them reflect about the deep features of the problems related to the physics principles involved. We find that there is a large overlap between the introductory and graduate students in their ability to categorize. Moreover, introductory students in the calculus-based courses performed better categorization than those in the algebra-based courses even though the categorization task is conceptual. Other investigations involved exploring if reflection could be taught as a skill on individual and group levels. For example, explicit self-diagnosis in recitation investigated how effectively students could diagnose their own errors on difficult problems, how much scaffolding was necessary for this purpose, and how effective transfer was to other problems employing similar principles. Difficulty in applying physical principles and difference between the self-diagnosed and transfer problems affected performance. Moreover, we concluded that a sustained intervention is required to learn effective problem-solving strategies. Another study involving reflection on problem solving with peers suggests that those who reflected with peers drew more diagrams and had a larger gain from the midterm to final exam. Another study in quantum mechanics involved giving common problems in midterm and final exams and suggested that advanced students do not automatically reflect on their mistakes. Interviews revealed that even advanced students often focus mostly on exams rather than learning and building a robust knowledge structure. A survey was developed to further evaluate students’ attitudes and approaches towards problem solving. The survey responses suggest that introductory students and even graduate students have different attitudes and approaches to problem solving on several important measures compared to physics faculty members. Furthermore, responses to individual survey questions suggest that expert and novice attitudes and approaches to problem solving may be more complex than naively considered.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009, Graduate Students/Undergraduate Students/Faculty/Staff Coffee Hour, 4:00 PM, 318 Allen Hall, PITT

Thursday, July 9, 2009, Astro Coffee, 2:00 PM, 416 Allen Hall, PITT

Thursday, July 9, 2009, Vlad Gheorghiu, CMU, "Multipartite entanglement transformation", 4:30 PM, Wean 7316, Coffee and doughnuts at 4:00 PM in Wean 7423, CMU.

Abstract:  Entanglement is one of the most peculiar phenomena in quantum mechanics. Whereas bipartite entanglement seems to be quite well understood, it is not so with multipartite entanglement. In this talk I will present an interesting result from PRL 101, 140502 (2008), which states that the problem of deciding whether a pure state |PSI> can be converted to another pure state |PHI> by local operations and classical communication (LOCC) is NP hard, even in the case of a probabilistic transformation. This is surprising since in the bipartite case there exist easy to check necessary and sufficient conditions for such a transformation to be possible (Nielsen's majorization conditions).