July 2010

Just listen, dammit! Why faculty don’t – or do -change their teaching.

July 27, 2010

We had a visit from Melissa Dancy today, to discuss her research, with Charles Henderson, on how and why faculty adopt new teaching practices. We’ve put in a lot of magnificent effort, she said, to develop innovative teaching techniques that have proven effects on student learning.  Education researchers get frustrated, trying to tell faculty that [...]

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Out of one, many: Five researchers analyze the same student video (#aaptsm10)

July 21, 2010

I’m going to attempt to liveblog (again, from AAPT) on this very interesting presentations, where five theoretical perspectives are brought to bear on a single video of classroom interactions.  You can see the video itself online at Dewey Dykstra’s website, by looking under the “Different Perspectives” folder.  There you’ll find the video, its transcript, and [...]

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Education technology posts at AAPT (#aaptsm10)

July 21, 2010

I’ve posted several items about educational technology from AAPT on my other blog, TheActiveClass.  You can see those here: Do students learn better with peer instruction?  Does it last? Common challenges in using clickers Effective use of technology in physics education

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Students’ understanding of energy: Acting out our thinking (#aaptsm10)

July 21, 2010

At the AAPT meeting, the folks from Seattle Pacific University have taken one session by storm, to discuss their thinking and experimentation on students’ idea of energy.  They’re working, in particular, on embodied cognition — learning activities that involve the body to symbolically engage in a scientific problem. Lane Seeley opened out with the claim [...]

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Students playing the “classroom” game can give silly answers (#aaptsm10)

July 20, 2010

Another post on today’s sessions at the AAPT… In one talk on “epistemological priming” (Paul Hutchison, Grinnell), he made a compelling case for the fact that students aren’t using their everyday reasoning in physics class.  He asked them the question, “If you throw a ball horizontally, and a ball straight down, which will hit the [...]

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Student reasoning in tutorials (#AAPTsm10)

July 20, 2010

I’m at the American Association of Physics Teachers meeting, and will be trying to liveblog some of my observations from sessions while I’m here.  The absence of wireless may dampen the true “live”-ness of the liveblog, but I’ll aim for semi-live blogging – ie., I’ll post stuff from my hotel at night, before I collapse [...]

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Why can’t I hear right? Stephanie researches her ears.

July 12, 2010

[[NOTE:  The update on my symptoms and the resulting diagnosis is in the comments if you're curious.  I get a lot of comments on this post asking for updates, so please look in the comments for the answer!]] I’ve had the most distressing symptoms over the past week, which sparked my biophysics curiosity.  At first [...]

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Eyeballs in the Fridge: Why do we love science?

July 10, 2010

I just ran across an interesting new study with the provocative title, “Eyeballs in the Fridge:  Sources of early interest in science”.  Here’s a short review.   You can read the original article here. This was particularly interesting to me because I’m a person with a strong early interest and aptitude for science, but in a [...]

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The real meaning of common teaching phrases

July 9, 2010

The APS (American Physics Society) recently published a bit of “humor” — the “real” meaning of common teaching phrases. I was smiling along as I read jokes like: Peer Instruction: What is happening when 5 workers are at a construction site and only 1 has a shovel. or inquiry-based activity :  What instructors have the [...]

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This is a redundant clock

July 7, 2010

Thanks to Don Baird of the Blog of Phyz for this little treasure… And from the website hosting the picture: This is a redundant clock. And this is a redundant description. Hee hee.

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Web 2.0 in the classroom (#ISTE10)

July 4, 2010

I wanted to let you know about a blog post that I recently created over at The Active Class, on the use of blogs and wikis in K12 classrooms. There are some nice summaries of one small research study that looked at what worked (and what didn’t) in teachers’ uses of these tools, with some [...]

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Summer Science Clubs: Avoiding summer “brain-mush” syndrome for kids

July 4, 2010

This is a post geared more towards parents than teachers because, after all, parents are the ultimate teachers, right?  It’s summer, and kids get to turn their brains off for three months.  Well, mostly.  Connie “The Science Club Mom” shares her experiences on how to do some fun science projects for kids as part of [...]

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