This PERC talk was from Anna Sfard about how we construct meaning socially
How we talk about things, says Sfard, matters. How we talk about things changes what we see, and also what we do.
How do we talk about math or physics? How do we talk about learning math and physics?
We need more than one way of talking.
For example, she showed a clip of a teacher discussing negative numbers with her class. She had students re-invent the rules for adding and subtracting signed numbers. SHe expected that students would have a hard time with “minus times minus” but instead the first problem was about “plus plus minus”. What is 2 times (-5)? One student gave the answer that 2 times -5 is -10 because “5 is the bigger number”. The class followed this student, citing that rule for the answer for several other problems. When the teacher presented her argument, the children were skeptical and openly disbelieved her.
What went wrong?
We can see learning as acquisitionist and participationist.
If learning is change, what is is that changes when a person learns math/physics?
Acquisitionist. Piaget would say “one’s concepts/mental schemas change. One constructs and acquires those new constructs.” Learning depends on our cognitive makeup.
Participationist. Vygotsky wuld say one’s participation in an activity, form or practice changes. The form of activity or way of performing a task changes. Learning depends on human agency.
Acquisitionist and participationist are not incompatible. Both are useful. You can choose which one to use depending on what you’re looking at.
What about school learning?
School learning means a change in thinking. But what is thinking?
People develop skills by doing things together. These activities are communicated by communication. So “commognition=communication + cognition”. Learning, says, Sfard, is a form of communication.
What is math or physics?
Math is a way of thinking. It’s a discourse. We communicate about math through keywords, symbols, descriptions, and processes (like proofs). But is communication all there is to math (or physics)? What is number? It’s an idea we made up to communicate something about the world. Apart from people, number (or force) doesn’t really exist. We can’t describe “force” without using the word force!?
Let’s go back to the example of the math class and negative numbers. That class created new rules together, though not the ones the teacher wanted them to arrive at. What they arrived at wasn’t consistent or contingent on other things that they knew (or would eventually know). The teacher has knowledge that the students didn’t have. She was an expert and needed to have an active role in that conversation. However, she was likely to use words in a different way, with different rules, than the students would. So, the class needed to agree about who gets the final say if people don’t agree. Invention isn’t enough! The teacher didn’t make it explicit how she goes about talking about ideas, and she renounced her leadership. So, the students invented their own rule, a rule that wasn’t that great, and the teacher’s leadership was difficult to regain because they hadn’t formed an agreement on the role of teachers and students.
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This is the from PERC (Physics Education Research Conference). This talk was by Andrea diSessa (Berkeley), who developed the theory of phenomenological primitives (or p-prims).
diSessa’s recent work is looking at how students’ intuitive ideas help them construct meaning. For example, Newton’s Law of cooling says that the rate of change of temperature of something is proportional to the difference in temperature between the thing and its surrounding. That means that liquids cool off quickly at first. One of the students in the high school class that he studied explained that “so when one is way off they kind of freak out” and then they “calm down” when they get closer to equilibrium.
Going back to 1993, in his writings on p-prims he developed some ideas of ideas that people bring to problems such as these. Eg., “more effort begets more result”, a p-prim of “agency.” “Abstract balance” is a p-prim indicating that in certain situations things must balance out. Abstract imbalance is the idea that things can be “out of balance.” Equilibration is a “return to balance” that can involve either overshooting equlibration or slowing equlibration.
“I think that the liquids like to be in equilibrium [abstract balance], so when one is way off they sort of freak out and work harder to reach equilibration [abstract balance, where "agency" is defined as "freaking out" and "working harder"] and when it’s closer to equilibrium they’re more calm [lower agency]. So they sort of drift slowly [lower effort begets lower rate of change].
So, this person has introduced agency (“freaking out”) in an area that is usually not seen as having agency. The amount of agency is controlled by the temperature differency, and “more effot begets more change” is invoked to explain the rate of heating and cooling. The net result is that the student has created a causal chain in his understanding of heating and cooling. These are very useful ideas! Temperature difference is what drives the rate of heating and cooling in this student’s mind, which is exactly right!
What about how the glass reaches equilibration…. does it slow down and approach equlibration, or does it “overshoot” it and then come back? Here is one student explanation: “The hot water is like shocked.. but the colder water that you put it into… causes it to cool down really quickly. but once it’s at a lesser temperature, it starts to slow down as it reaches equilibrium.” Like the word “freaking out”, “shocked” invokes an idea of agency. “Once the really cold water gets put into the much warmer water, it experiences like a shock because they’re so drastically different. So it gets closer to that temperature faster in the beginning and stops freaking out and calms down as it approaches equilibrium.” Again, this student is bringing up the idea of temperature difference being important.
Eventually, though the students start translating their ideas into math. A few days later, a student asks why the cooling graph for a hot object is steeper than that for acold object the student says “because the hot one is further away from equilibrium than the cold one.” She’s dropped the anthropomorphism and ideas of agency.
So, these intuitive ideas help students make sense of something, and move towards a more abstract formal understanding. Note that this is like the ideas in one of my first posts this week, where we discussed how to use students’ informal understanding of some event to build up a more mathematical description.
He emphasized that social interaction, like how these kids figured out their ideas of heating and cooling, is an important part of how we know.
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This is the beginning of the PERC (Physics Education Research Conference). This talk was by Michael Posner, about how brain science informs us about effective classroom learning.
Brain research gives us insight into the process of how people learn and understand, including techniques like fMRI. Neuroimaging contributes to our understanding of how we should teach. In language, for example, skilled readers don’t have to concentrate on the details of reading — such as the organizaiton of letters into a unit or a word. But children who are still in the process of doing this, or who have reading difficulties, can have trouble extracting the meaning of their reading because they’re still concentrated on this process of reading, which makes it difficult to focus on the meaning behind the words that they’re reading (or, even, to enjoy it). Studies on people with brain injury shows us which areas of the brain are relevant for these different tasks.
Infants, even at 7 months, have some primitive ability to count. For example, when infants are shown two puppets, which are covered by a screen, and then a 3rd puppet is added, they will look longer when there is 1 puppet left when the screen is taken away than if the addition is correct. When we look at the brain activity in the relevant area (the anterior singulate, which is active in error correction), these infants show activity in the same area as do adults (albeit a few milliseconds later).
Attention and self regulation is a large area of his study. This is what, he tells us, lets us stay seated in this room despite our desire to go out for cocktails. The ability to concentrate and control oneself is very important for kids in school, who need to sit still in class, not leave, and deal with their fear about school.
Expertise. We’re trying to build particular skills in college. An expert chess player, exposed to 5 seconds of a master game, can reproduce the entire board. A novice can only do the usual memory span of 5 or 6 pieces. The expert can chunk the board into portions. We chunk letters into words when we read, and we chunk portions of faces together to let us recognize them. There is a particular part of the brain that works on this chunking operation, and another part of the brain that then remembers if we know that person. An expert in birds see birds in a different way — the visual part of their brain reacts differently to birds than a non-expert. It performs automatically and delivers the information to other parts of the brain. What about physics experts. Do they see the world differently? He showed us a standard textbook picture of a spool being pulled. It’s likely, he says, that our posterior visual system reacts differently to this picture, due to our training, in relation with other aspects of the brain.
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Today’s session is about pre-service and in-service teacher training
There is very little research to direct teacher training programs, which are treated as practical programs, and even less in physics. A lot of work has been done in what’s called “pedagogical content knowledge” or “PCK” — you can see my previous posts here and here from last year’s AAPT. There is little documentation on most of the teacher preparation programs, with notable exceptions of Etkina’s and McDermott’s programs to teach physics teachers, and the modeling courses. This lack of documentation has made it difficult to extract essential features of “what makes a good teacher preparation program” since there are so many holes in the literature and research we can’t do meta-analysis.
Gay Stewart talkeda bout how her physics department got involved with local school districts, and got to know the teachers and gain their respect. But it depended strongly on the particular school district and the power structure in each district. Local teachers were able to tell her who she should talk to in order to get traction in the district.
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As anyone who knows one whit about me recognizes, this talk about Frank Oppenheimer and his creation of the Exploratorium was deeply significant to me. I was a postdoc under Paul Doherty in the Teacher Institute for two years (and am tracing Frank back in time, as I’m now in the physics department at CU Boulder). I never knew Frank Oppenheimer, but in a way I do, as the Exploratorium embodies his vision and spirit of play and exporation. I was deeply affected by my time at the Exploratorium — it changed the way that I see the world and science. My brain was buzzing for the two years I was at the museum, I felt constantly stimulated by the creativity and curiosity of the people around me.
I remember one day, it was a Monday, when the museum was closed. Mondays were when the people in charge of exhibits could do stuff on the museum floor that are hard to do when there are 400 kids actively demonstrating Brownian motion. We got an all-call email, “Come to the atrium to see something really cool.” I’ll bite, so I wandered over to the museum, and saw a small crowd forming in front of something large. It turned out to be an *immense* spherical mirror. It was maybe 10 feet tall and 15 feet wide, and created a flawless real image… a ghostly “you” floating in air about 5 feet in front of the mirror. It was a huge version of one of those “grab the coin” toys, where the coin appears to float above the surface. We proceeded to play. We’d walk towards the mirror, and the image would go through a transition, smearing out and flipping sickeningly upside-down, becoming a more familiar “virtual” image. My favorite was when we realized that the mirror was reflecting sound waves in the same way as it did light waves. Standing on the left hand side of the mirror, I would see a perfect image of my colleague (who was standing on the right side), directly in front of me. I whispered into the image of their ear. An image of my *voice* was created next to their ear, and it sounded to them as if I was whispering directly into their ear, even though I was maybe 5 feet away.
Everyone has their stories like this from the Exploratorium, and KC Cole’s talk showed me how much this spirit of creative and social exploratory play emodies the spirit of the man behind the place. Even though he died 20 years ago, he came up in conversation at the Exploratorium all the time. People were always making sure that his philosophy still matched what they were doing. An entire community of people inspired and dedicated to the vision of this man. KC Cole had numerous stories of her time with him, when she was in her 20’s, and how he influenced her life. After the talk, one man came up to tell her, “I was an Explainer at the Exploratorium. That’s why I’m a physicist today.” How charming. I went up to my collleague Mike Dubson and said, “I want to go back to the Exploratorium!” He told me that he feels a special connection to Frank, because he currently holds the “senior instructor” position that Frank vacated when he went to build the Exploratorium.
I miss the Exploratorium like a lover. An appropriate metaphor, as one of the stories that KC told, if I’m remembering correctly, is that “Curiosity is like sex. It has a practical purpose, but that’s almost never why anybody does it.” I made the decision to leave San Francisco to come to Boulder, but if I’d wanted to stay in the Bay Area, I would have tried to stick to the Exploratorium like glue. That postdoc was one of the happiest times of my life. If only I could manage to work with them in some capacity, but the economy is so tough.
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Today’s session is about using interactive lecture demonstrations to effectively improve your students’ understanding of concepts.
As I mentioned in my previous post, while students like demos, they don’t get the things we want them to get unless they predict the results of the experiement or somehow get involved. David Sokoloff showed how they have used interactive lecture demonstrations in their classrooms, for example, with the standard demonstration where a lens makes an imagine of a candle. What happens when you cover over half the lens? Most students say that half the image will go away, but the true answer is that it gets dimmer. They first describe the experiment, ask students to predict the results on their own, and then discuss with their neighbors, then show the results. Sometimes it’s a physical demonstration, sometimes there will be computer data involved (such as graphing the capacitance and voltage of a real circuit). They’ve started using clickers (i>clicker) and are looking for people who would like to use some of their clicker interactive lecture demonstrations — email him at sokoloff @ uoregon dot edu. Sounds like a great addition to an intro physics course!
There are a lot of recommendations and research on the interactive lecture demo approach in Redish’ book.
Jason Kahn (Tufts) presented some results from a conceptual evaluation showing that students do MUCH better on conceptual questions related to these topics after interactive lecture demonstrations. However, the learning gains don’t seem quite as high when they use clickers. They conjecture that the clickers don’t require students do actually do ray tracing, etc., as much as when they don’t have clickers. (My thought on that is that you shouldn’t present the clicker answer choices until they’ve done the ray tracing and other cognitive work required to arrive at an answer). That’s why they’re looking for people to try this in their course, so they can try to replicate these results.
Several other speakers talked about using interactive lecture demonstrations in their classrooms, and emphasized that it’s important to use them in the way intended by the developers, that it takes class time, but students respond positively to them. They are more likely to talk to each other and to ask questions.
One speaker discussed how they use video analysis software to analyze digital videos, which they often use in conjunction with interactive demos. You can see their materials here.
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This session is about how using discrepant (or “surprising”) events to teach physics
There’s quite a bit of evidence showing that students don’t really get what we want them to get from demonstrations, but they do like them. They get a lot more out of them if we ask them to predict the results of the demonstration in advance. The Detroit area physics teachers went a step further and gave a popular session on “discrepant events” — using demonstrations with surprising results and asking students to first predict what will happen. He often phrases the questions as mutliple choice and students vote with a show of hands (though clickers could be a great way to do this too). You can find these at dmapt.org. Here are some examples:
Hoop and a disk
When you roll a hoop and a disk down a ramp, which one will win? It’s the disk, because it’s harder to get going because it has a higher moment of inertia. He had a few variations on this — a disk and a sphere, same mass (sphere wins), or a large sphere (2M) and a small sphere (M) (both roll at the same rate).
Springs
When you hang two masses from a bar using springs, and let one mass bounce, what will happen to the other mass? (they resonate, so the 2nd mass starts to bounce and the 1st mass slows. What if we change the 2nd mass so it’s not the same as the first mass? We don’t get resonance in that case. What if we use 2M on one spring, and make the 1st spring twice as long? We get resonance again!
Projectile motion
We manage to hit one of those little troll dolls (a “conTROLLed experiment?”) with a ball launched from a little ball launcher. If he changes the angle, will he still hit the doll? Well… he cheated… the ball launcher has an angle-o-meter on the back, and he used comlementary angles (eg., 60/30) to manage to hit the target even with the changed angle. A good activity for the first day of class.
Bike tire
Suspend a bike wheel from a string and get it spinning vertically. What will happen when you let it go? (It keeps spinning and precesses). This one’s hard to describe in words…
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This session is about how some institutions have sustained change in their courses, and what are the central features of changes that stick: Eugenia Etkina (Rutgers), Steven Pollock (CU Boulder), Charles Henderson (Western Michigan).
The NSF will provide money to create reforms, but individual institutions have to figure out how to make them stick. How is this done? Faculty, of course, are self-interested folks. What’s in it for them if they use your reformed materials when they teach that course?
Faculty need help to:
Use interactive lecture methods
Use your curriculum
Get appropriate professional development
Change their exams to assess the new elements of student learning that are being emphasized in the course
Work with PER faculty to generate departmental support.
Traditionally, we’ve trained faculty to do these sorts of things and hope that they stick, but at Rutgers instead they made a new staff line to promote and support these reforms. These staff are taken from graduate students who don’t finish their degree, PhDs who don’t go into academia, or post-docs. These jobs are easier to create than faculty lines, but there is no set career advancement path for those poor slobs (like me!) who take those jobs. They also work with pre-service teachers in a great program to teach them how to use interactive teaching methods — they then use these pre-service teachers to staff these refromed courses.
Steven Pollock talked about our work at Colorado, and pointed out that faculty involvement includes faculty ownership — faculty meet to design course goals, develop materials, and to personalize the materials that have been previously created. We have a departmental culture that supports faculty learning about these transformations through working groups, brown bags, faculty meetings, and team teaching. At Colorado, students also buy in to the process — the vast majority find clickers useful for their learning, for example. So, he suggests, the critical features seem to be to have
initiators and proponents of the change
institutional support
resources such as materials, staff and class space
faculty buy-in, including team teaching and personalization of materials
student buy-in
departmental culture
Charles Henderson discussed the particular issues surrounding new faculty, focusing on a new study by Boice. New faculty struggle to deal with the teaching load in their first year, and research suffers (contrary to their expectations), but they aren’t particularly sophisticated in being able to ask for help and support in their teaching. Instead they focus on the practice and principles of lecture and the content that is being presented. They predict that their schedules will get more balanced, though they have no specific strategies to change their work weeks, and even though teaching is sucking up all their time, they’re not getting very good student evaluations. Around the third semester faculty start to present easier material and blame poor student preparation for their continued difficulty in teaching. In the fourth semester they still have no ans to change their approach, and they resent how much teaching is cutting into their research productivity.
So, new faculty
Equate good teaching = good content
Teach cautiously and defensively to avoid criticism
Blame external factors for their failures
Don’t know how to improve teaching beyond improving content and making tests easier
We need to do more than let faculty “sink or swim” in the complex realm of teaching.
He advocates
New faculty workshops (broad awareness of instructional strategies)
Co-teaching (deep learning about one strategy)
The new faculty workshop he discussed is the new astronomy and physics workshop put together by the APS. This is a short one time intervention where faculty go to a 4-day workshop to learn about a variety of instructional strategies, and it’s made mostly of “telling” — ie., the faculty passively learn about these different strategies. So it doesn’t seem like it should work very well, from what we know about professional development, but oddly, it does. A lot of faculty have improved awareness, attitudes, and use of PER based materials after the workshop — even according to their departmental chairs! This workshop serves as a gateway, motivating them to work on more productive teaching strategies, rather than embarking on the downward spiral that Boice described. One faculty said that the workshop “provided an important seed.” They’re getting interested in new techniques at the workshop and then doing more work on their own.
What about co-teaching? Henderson and Dancy have a great paper that I highly recommend about the value of co-teaching, and we at Colorado have also found this immensely valuable in promoting faculty change and sustaining reforms. Henderson described the evolution of one teacher who he worked with, who was initially skeptical of these new teaching methods, started to think that maybe some of these methods were OK, and was eventually very positive. One thing that this co-teacher valued was that he wasn’t Henderson’s “apprentce”, it was a collegial relationship. This strategy is effective because a lot of the complex decision-making involved in teaching practices are being modeled and discussed in an immersive way. Might this be effective for graduate students, he suggests?
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This session is about the state of affairs regarding women in physics and how we can address it.
Well, no surprise, there’s still a big disparity between the number of men and women in physics — we lose women from physics at every major transition — from HS to college, college to graduate school — and entering academia. About 1/3 of HS physics teachers are women, but only 6% of full physics professors are women.
43% of married female physicists are married to physicists, but 6% of married male physicists are married to other physicists. So, women are — half the time — trying to deal with a trailing spouse!
What about in the classroom? Boys get higher grades in HS physics and women in college tend to earn higher grades than their male counterparts. Women’s SAT scores, however, underpredict their grades in college. In physics, however, women earn lower grades than men. This appears to be affected by whether the professor is female, and whether the students had physics in HS (both improve women’s grades). So, whereas women do better than men overall in college, that’s not true in physics! And they’re just not participating in physics to the same level as men.
This speaker claimed that the statement that women prefer interactive engagement techniques is actually not supported by research. It’s true that poor teaching makes both men and women leave the sciences. Does good teaching help? Lorenzo, Crouch and Mazur (2006) reduced the gender gap (on the Force Concept Inventory) by using interactive engagement. However, at Boulder (Pollock, Finkelstein and Kost, 2007) they found that this depended on the instructor, Jennifer Docktor found there was no instructor effect, and Eric Anderson found that interactive engagement didn’t help the gap. Help! It seems to be much more complicated than just “interactivity helps women learn.” The jury is still out.
Ted Hodapp from the APS explained that women are actually doing pretty well in physics, though this is not true of minorities. These are results from the APS Gender Equity conference. Female PhD’s increase by 4% per year. Hey, great, it’s going up! Not by much, however, this isn’t true of minorities, for whom the curve is flat. But only some people are getting to that point in the first place. “Focus on elementary!” waved one woman from the back. That’s where we’re losing women, is at the 4th and 5th grade.
The good news though is that women who DO finish their PhD are just as likely to be hired as men are.
In terms of Bachelor’s degrees, most science and engineering fields have seen a dramatic increase in the number of majors… but not physics (which is pretty flat.)
The results of the Gender Equity conference are numerous — you can download the report at the link. You can also sign up to get the Gazette — a newsletter of the committee for the status of women in physics.
Some ideas are:
Create a supportive climate for women, including transparency in policies and a “zero tolerance” policy for offensive comments
Nominate women for prizes
Stop the tenure clock for family leave
But see the report for more, those are just the ones I wrote down!
The nice thing about this session, I must say, was a great amount of thoughtful discussion and interjections from the audience, who is clearly informed and engaged in this topic.
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This session is about how we prepare our undergraduates for graduate school — what to consider, and how we’re doing.
One thing to consider, in thinking about the goals of our undergraduate majors, is that we actually don’t want to prepare all of our undergraduates for graduate school. Physics is a liberal arts degree, allowing students a broad education that is relevant for many careers. Many employers need students who are good problem-solvers, for a wide variety of jobs.
If they do want t go on to graduate school, however, they should be aware that graduate work is a loooong apprenticeship, with an emphasis on research. About half of graduate students finish their PhD within 6 years. To boot, they’re not likely to get academic jobs — the odds are long. About 60% of physics jobs (for PhDs) are in the private sector, and only about 30% in academia. And it’s tough to stick with it – some schols have a 80% attrition rate! So, should we send all our students to graduate school when there is such a high rate of “failure”?
But, if a student does want to get a PhD, they should know that to be successful in graduate school you need to really love physics, and be persisent. And be able to do the work (do the math, have scientific creativity), and be able to deal with frustration. The AAPT has a nice guide for students considering a PhD in physics.
Ken Heller spoke at more length about what a student needs to do to be successful in graduate school:
Move away from a student mentality to a more professional attitude (responsibility, working in groups, good communication skills, as well as independent work).
Problem solving skills — Such as being able to work from first principles or know when that’s not possible, not expecting problems to have unique solutions, making decisions instead of just knowing how to do it, carry out complex solutions in a logical matter, document the steps towards the solution and evaluate the final answer. A lot of graduate students are traumatized when they’re asked to do something they don’t know how to do! Of course, success in this area requires that students have some idea about how they learn and what they don’t know… which we know they’re not very good at.
Know your physics, of course. Common principles and techniques in multiple physics topics and the interconnectedness between those topics. Why do we use the representations and techniques that we do?
I think that a lot of these aspects of graduate student training are, indeed, addressed by our own work at the University of Colorado to transform our upper division classes to more explicitly teach some of the concepts and skills by using interactive techniques where students need to communicate their ideas to each other. If you want more information on that work, you can visit this site. I’ll be uploading our new paper and my AAPT talk there shortly.
Another thing that helps students develop these skills, once they’re in graduate school, are teaching experiences (eg., TA-ship) and apprentice-ships. Undergraduates can also get such teaching experience (see for example the learning assistant program at CU), which is invaluable in helping them learn the material as well as understanding how people learn effectively. Explicit problem-solving instruction, said Dr. Heller, is also very important. Students don’t pick this up naturally, rather the logical appraoch to solving new problems needs to be taught directly. (However, I know that there has been some doubt cast on the usefulness of the whole plan-implement-evaluate problem solving cycle. That’s not really how experts solve problems, that’s how we solve exercises… though I asked that question of Dr. Heller and he claims that this expert-like problem solving method is not controversial — his colleagues say that they solve problems that way.)
What about research experiences? This was the subject of Dr. Yennello’s talk. Students get technical and problem solving skills from doing research as undergraduates, but even more important, they learn many aspects of working on big problems — many of the items mentioned by previous speakers, such as dealing with frustration, time management, communication, collaboration, as well as leadership and self-confidence.
A study by SRI did a long term study of undergraduates involved in research. Dr. Yennello claimed this study had a lot of good messages — students involved in undergraduate research learned a lot of good skills. I don’t disagree totally, however, I notice that almost all the survey answers got positive responses from students… they agreed that they learned good things (“I understod the nature of a job of a researcher”) and disagreed with negative statements (like, “I learned that research is not for me.”) I wonder how many students were trying to say good things about an experience where they felt others were doing something to help them. Plus, these were all self-reports — these are things that the undergraduates felt that they were gaining. What did they actually gain? Interesting, more students indicated they thought they would go for the PhD after this experience than beforehand.
However, in order to create a good experience for undergraduates, it takes a committment of time and energy to mentor these students. I’m thinking of my own REU experience, where I was supervised by a graduate student. She was supportive at first, but then became frustrated with what she perceived as a lack of effort on my part to answer my own questions. I think there was a lot that I didn’t know, and also I hadn’t been taught how to solve new problems. I was one of those “A” students who followed the rules and did well. She snapped at me towards the end, when I asked how to go about a particular analysis, “I think you know how to do that.” I didn’t, and stared at the screen in tears while she worked in angry silence next to me, ignoring my sniffles. She didn’t help me figure out how to solve my problem, and admonished me for not knowing. That’s a terrible way to encourage anyone in science, especially women. I definitely didn’t come out of that experience feeling any sort of confidence in my abilities as a scientist or researcher. Too bad.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
I am a physicist, writer, podcaster, and educator in Boulder, CO. On this blog I get to wax on about science stuff I think is cool (like weird science, or stuff we think is true but isn't), K-16 science education, hands-on science activities, teaching pedagogy, and how to communicate science. Geek on. 8-)
This PERC talk was from Anna Sfard about how we construct meaning socially
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