Educational Change

Standards Based Grading… with Voice (#AAPTsm11)

August 11, 2011

We had a fantastic banquet speaker at the Physics Education Research Conference (PERC) last week, Andy Rundquist of Hamline college (@arundquist).  Unfortunately, I didn’t have my laptop with me, so didn’t take the kind of notes that helps me to report most accurately on a talk.  So here’s a test of sciencegeekgirl’s poor memory. When [...]

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Providing validated tests for instructors to use (#AAPTsm11)

August 4, 2011

Our plenary speaker this morning was Thomas Holme, of Iowa State University, speaking to us about the standardized assessments in chemistry.  Sounds boring, but he raised some interesting and insightful thoughts about assessment. He started out by describing the fine line he has to walk as an instructor: “Teaching is inherently personal and inescapably corporate.  [...]

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Adopt, Adapt or Abandon? Instructors’ Decisions to Use Research-Based Materials (#AAPTsm11)

August 3, 2011

Just gave my 10-minute talk at AAPT on my work examining the sustainability of our course transformation efforts in junior E&M. Physics education researchers often develop materials for classroom use. Instructors then choose which of those materials they would like to implement. We present a case study of University of Colorado’s transformed junior E&M course. [...]

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Teaching with Clickers: How, for What, and with What Mind-Set? #AAPTsm11 #clickers

August 1, 2011

Again, I’m here blogging from the AAPT.  Ian Beatty gave a particularly lovely talk on clickers today, a very nice example of presentation zen at its finest.  I think he had perhaps 3 main points and 10 main visuals for a 30 minute talk.  Nicely done.  But professional ego stroking aside, I very much liked [...]

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Seeing isn’t believing: Do classroom demonstrations help students learn? (Learning About Teaching Physics podcast)

July 29, 2011

In this first episode of my new Learning About Teaching Physics podcast, we explore classroom demonstrations.  Do they accomplish what we hope that they will? Physics is the study of nature. So, physics classes typically include demonstrations of how those laws of nature play out, often in surprising ways. But do students see what we [...]

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New podcast: Learning About Teaching Physics

July 28, 2011

This has actually been in the works for about a year, but I’m finally unveiling my brainchild of the past several years — a podcast to communicate physics education research to working teachers.  I’m calling it Learning About Teaching Physics, and our amazing local high school teacher Michael Fuchs is co-hosting it with me.  Here’s [...]

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Teaching with style: Physics to stake your life on

June 29, 2011

A friend just sent me this YouTube video, and I show it here as an example of how lecture can be used to utmost effectiveness.  A bit of showmanship, a memorable experiment, and crystal clear explanations: What strikes me is that this instructor has got this class in the palm of his hand. Not just [...]

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Instilling Scientific Curiosity in Students

June 20, 2011

Today is a guest post about scientific curiosity and its implications for STEM education.  What Jeremy writes about is something that I’ve seen referred to again and again — students drop from science in droves.  We lose science-interested students at every major transition — from elementary to middle school, from middle to high, and so [...]

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The Psychology of Climate Change Communication

June 16, 2011

I’m increasingly interested in how education researchers can more effectively get their messages across, so that people act on these findings (see my post about my FFPERPS talk, Get the Word Out).   I’ve been writing a lot about climate change communication lately because climate change communicators face some of the same challenges — communication of [...]

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The importance of mental models

June 13, 2011

I wrote last week about how the metaphors we use in communication have a powerful effect on how the issue is framed and how people understand and/or are convinced by what we say. Part of the thing that is so powerful about metaphors is that they prime us to think about something in a certain [...]

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A new site for identifying misconceptions

June 9, 2011

When teaching, it’s crucial to know what your students tend to have difficulty with, so you can target your instruction to those topics. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) just released a really nicely designed website called Science Assessment for identifying these common student difficulties with content in life science, physical science, [...]

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Communication and persuasion: The importance of metaphor and framing

June 6, 2011

I‘ve written here and here about climate and persuasion, and what this means for us as education reformers working to change the system from within.  Today I want to write about metaphor and framing. Framing is basically how you describe, or “frame” an issue — what is the issue, why is it important, what should [...]

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When arguments backfire: Climate change communication and persuasion

June 1, 2011

I wrote before about how skeptics of Obama’s birthright aren’t convinced by a flimsy slip of paper indicating his citizenship — that hitting a belief head-on with data generally doesn’t work.  Instead, arguments are more persuasive when they fit with someone’s previous mental models of how the world works.  Confronting a “birther” with Obama’s birth [...]

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News flash! Interactive engagement helps students learn

May 23, 2011

A study that I was told about last year was just released in the latest issue of Science — in A Better Way to Teach? my colleagues in the Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia detail their rather elegant study.  Picture this — a young upstart postdoc approaches a veteran teacher, who [...]

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Get the word out: Effective communication of physics education research

May 16, 2011

I recently gave a plenary talk at the Foundation and Frontiers of Physics Education Research – Puget Sound conference.  What an honor!  And very fun, because I got to talk about anything that I wanted to.  I’ve been wanting — for ages — to talk about the intersections that I see between science journalism and [...]

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A thoughtful approach to instruction: Course transformation for the rest of us

April 13, 2011

I keep meaning to write a post about my most recent publication in the Journal of College Science Teaching:  A Thoughtful Approach to Instruction (downloads seem to be free).  The program I’m part of at the University of Colorado is the Science Education Initiative.  Started by Carl Wieman when he got the Nobel Prize for [...]

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Free webinars on clickers — how to use them and how to teach about them

January 13, 2011

Hey, I just wanted readers to know about my two upcoming webinars on clicker use.  One is on how to teach faculty how to use clickers effectively — basically, some tips on effective professional development.  That’s coming up next Tuesday!  The second is a repeat of an earlier webinar — how to use clickers effectively.  [...]

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Webinar: Writing great (science) clicker questions

November 1, 2010

The kind folks at i>clicker have invited me back to give another webinar on effective use of personal response systems.  This one’s called Writing Great Clicker Questions and will be focused on techniques and tips in writing questions that get students discussing and debating — questions that help students learn, rather than just assessing what [...]

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American Radio Works — Great radio pieces about education

October 20, 2010

I’m an avid podcast listener — this is how I get my information about the world, listening to wonderfully produced audio pieces while I drive around doing errands.  I recently discovered American Radio Works – a set of documentarians from American Public Media.  They do TV documentaries, but also these wonderful, well-researched and well-produced radio [...]

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What we’re NOT doing to train future physics teachers

October 14, 2010

Yesterday, we had a fascinating, but sobering, presentation from a group of physics educators charged with giving the nation a snapshot of how well we’re doing in training the next generation of physics educators.  It’s a pretty grim picture.  “Students who are becoming physics teachers are doing it on their own,” said David Meltzer, “and [...]

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