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 their methods of teaching aren’t working, and showing the data to prove it.  Yet most instructors are still teaching by traditional lecture format.  Why?

Well, while we’ve done a lot of research on what constitutes good teaching practices, we’ve done very little research on effective dissemination techniques.  The intuitive technique, which doesn’t work very well, goes something like this:

1. We demonstrate that traditional lecture is ineffective
2. We show alternative approaches and data that shows that they’re more effective
3. We publish articles and give workshops to get the word out
4. We wait for change to happen.

But, it doesn’t.  Why not?

We often blame faculty — say they don’t care about their teaching.  Well, surveys show that’s not really true.  But faculty generally adopt new teaching strategies based on both personal and structural factors.  They modify them according to their tastes and situation.

Melissa, along with Charles Henderson and Chandra Turpen did surveys and interviews of 22 faculty to identify what it is that they want to do in their class. The good news is, education researchers’ dissemination efforts have indeed been effective.  Most faculty know about research based instruction methods:

• 87% know about at least one of the strategies on their list
• 50% know 6 or more strategies
• 48% use at least one
• 70% want to use more research based strategies

However, they aren’t always using these methods in ways that are consistent with what we know causes learning gains. For example, 41% of peer instruction users change something about the method, and only 28% of instructors have students discuss the answer during the question — a key feature of peer instruction!

Not surprisingly, most people cited lack of time as a reason for not using more research-based techniques.  The factors that were most predictive of using research based techniques were:

• Attending new faculty workshop
• Attended workshops related to teaching
• Satisfaction with instructional goals
• Reading journals related to teaching
• Being female (!)

But, people who had high reearch productivity or large class size were just as likely to use these research-based techniques, which flies in the face of some of our assumptions about hard-core researchers being less interested in teaching.

Let’s take peer instruction as an example.  Where did people find out about it?  They would usually find out about peer instruction from a colleague, and decide to try it.  They would then read materials to find out more.  However, we usually put out all these materials in the hopes that people will read them and decide to try it based on those materials, but it seems that most people go to the written materials as a second step.  Similarly, they use the effectiveness data as a second step — to  justify to others why they’re doing what they’re doing, and to bolster their own confidence that they’re making the right choice. They don’t use that data to convince themselves, however.

So, we might conclude:

• Dissemination should focus on methods that involve personal contact with faculty
• Written materials should be geared towards helping faculty learn more, rather than convincing them
• Data should be presented to bolster their decision, rather than to convince them

So, dissemination is a poor model of creating change. We can’t just lecture people about making more interactive teaching!

We have to move towards a more effective model of change:

• Building communities to create social connections.  For example, the Modeling curriculum has been very effective, in part because they built a community first — they give ownership to the teachers, who teach the modeling workshops.
• Provide materials in a modifiable form, and support instructors in making effective modifications
• Support instructors as they implement it, rather than just giving it to them at the start
• Do some research on the barriers that instructors face in implementation
• Get into policy to create institutional opportunities for change

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 an outline of the researchers’ perspectives.  The video itself is of two teachers working through the Physics and Everyday Thinking (PET) curriculum.  The two teachers in the video are discussing the energy that is transferred to a nail when it’s rubbed on a magnet and becomes magnetized.  The researchers look for students conceptual understanding, how they build knowledge, what they do with their bodies, what productive resources they bring to the table that they build on, and how they talk to each other.

Myself, I’ve done some student video analysis (for an upcoming paper for AJP on Ampere’s Law), and I can attest that one can watch the same clip over and over from different perspectives and see so many things.  But it’s always hard, because you’re not sure if your hypotheses are supported by the evidence from this one snippet of student interaction. This uncertainty is reflected in these researchers’ analysis of this video, but they’re also able to identify many interesting and rich aspects of the video.  If we could do this exercise on the fly in the classroom, imagine how much we could see!

Andrew Boudreaux (Western Washington U.) discussed the video in terms of the importance of listening to students’ thinking. Theory, he says, can give us different windows on how students are thinking, rather than building a complete coherent framework for understanding what’s going on.  For example, the way that the teachers in the video discuss energy suggest that they have a model of “energy as activation” (see my earlier post on student understanding about energy).  We know the magnetized nail has energy because it can attract and repel,” says one, or “This one nail does not have energy, because it doesn’t do anything.”  Andrew comments that, because of his perspective on student thinking, he tends to go hunting for identifiable patterns in reasoning (many of which he discussed), contrasting those modular pieces of thinking with those shown by experts, and he tends to focus mostly on the written and spoken words (as opposed to the other modes of communication).  So, different theoretical perspectives can give us ideas about what to attend to when watching students work.

Dewey Dykstra (Boise State) focused instead on how students develop their theories about the physical world.  Dewey is a die-hard constructivist.  So, he says, trying to figure out what’s going on in students’ minds is a useless endeavor.  We can’t ever know what’s going on in another’s mind — we have no way to compare what we think is going on with an independent reality.  Likewise, what goes on in our mind can never be independently connected to an outside, “true” reality.  So, what he’s interested in is identifying how people’s ideas about the physical world change as they gain evidence that does or does not support what’s going on in their mind.  Seemingly in spite of his claim that we can’t know what’s going on in another’s mind, he then went on to describe evidence that suggests that students in the video have certain ideas, and are working to resolve inconsistencies between their ideas and physical reality (Piaget’s “disequilibration“).    In the video that he analyzed, students suggested that speed will increase with a constant force, because as you push the cart, force accumulates in the cart.  They’re still in the process of creating a conception of “net force”.  The instructional materials only seem to indirectly engage students in dealing with their deeper conceptual issues, he says.  Our materials need to more directly confront conceptual issues.

Rachel Scherr (Seattle Pacific) looked at the clips from the ideas of gesture and body movements. (Her earlier research was in gesture analysis). Students said something weird that she was trying to decipher:  “The unrubbed nail has energy potential, but it doesn’t have any energy.”  This didn’t make sense to her.  Perhaps, she thought, was that they saw the nail as having potential to have energy, like a container has the potential to contain something even if it’s currently empty.  She felt that she was able to step into their shoes and really empathize — to see the physics like they saw it.  In this metaphor, energy is a substance-like quantity.  This is a pure metaphor — energy doesn’t have mass or substance, but it’s a useful metaphor.  So, students are seeing objects that are containers that can be filled by energy.  Usually, they can’t be “filled up” by energy, but in the case of magnetic energy… they can!  There is a perfect magnetization that corresponds to being “full” of magnetic energy.  Students obviously weren’t thinking of potential energy like we do — our idea of “potential energy” is of a kind of energy (not an absence of energy) — that’s why their statements sound wrong.  Another metaphor (again, see previous post) is that energy is an activation agent — it makes things happen.   But that’s not the metaphor they’re using — they’re seeing it as a substance.  That’s why the student in the viddeo gets so excited when trying to describe energy — is it flowing?  They don’t like that word.  Is it present?  Maybe.  Is it stored?  Yes!  That have a eureka! moment because that description fits their metaphor.

It’s really important, says Rachel, to honor people’s ideas naive ideas. For example, one of our common examples of student misconceptions is that people will say that the force on a small car is larger than the force on a truck when they collide (but they’re equal by Newton’s law).  But that idea makes sense, she says.  After all, the force on a person in the car is greater than the force on a person in the truck — and that’s something that’s much more important to us.  That makes sense in a deep meaning.  When she scanned the video — as opposed to Andrew’s viewing — she didn’t go through it as a linear narrative.  Instead, she fast-forwarded, looking for unique and marked gestures in the clip, and found the example of the student yelling “stored!” and jumping up.  This was a really radiative act — one that she’s calling “metaphor identification euphoria”.   (Yes, you’re supposed to laugh at that term).  However, the students weren’t entirely comfortable with their use of their own bodies — they laughed, showing that this big movement didn’t match what we expect people to do in physics class.

Rosemary Russ (Northwestern U.) talked about the resources students bring to their understanding of physics.  Imagine two people, and one person asks the other – lets call her Sally — how to get to the airport in Chicago.  Sally describes how to get there by train, by the red line, etc.  However, that explanation is wrong — that is not the proper path to the airport.  However, she has still demonstrating that she has a lot of cognitive resources — she knows about the train system, knows that the traveler wants to take the train, knows which airport he wants to go to. So, she’s misused those resources in some way, but she still came to the table with a lot of resources.  Sally has some sort of fine-grained idea of what’s going on in the world, but if you looked inside Sally’s head you wouldn’t see a map of the route to the airport, but rather a set of loosely-connected ideas that she pulls together in order to give a verbal explanation of how to get to the airport.  The only way we know what that internal representation is, is through the things that she says.  That is our window on her fine-grained resources about the public transport system.

The same thing is true in physics courses.  Students come to the table with ideas about what words like energy, forces and potential mean.  They also have ideas about the world from their experiences — such as the north and south poles of magnets.  They also have abstract ideas, such as the ability of things to oppose (opposing ends of the magnet), or neutrality as being nothing, or of neutrality as a balancing out of two opposites.  She notices in the video how students use these productive resources to build new knowledge together.  She also notices that they bring epistemological resources to the table — or, productive ideas about how they learn.  They don’t appeal to authority (like a text book or a teacher), but they discuss the ideas amongst themselves and start to build understanding.

Valerie Otero (U. of Colorado) wrapped up the session, as was appropriate since this is actually her video data.  Her take on the video was that the teachers weren’t figuring out what they really thought — they were figuring out what they were supposed to be doing.  Her analysis focuses on the discourse, or dialogue, between the teachers.  It’s important, she says, for us to figure out how to “talk right” when learning science, so we can understand each other.  For example, some students will say “The ball stopped because the force ran out,” whereas what they really mean is “the oomph ran out.”  But in physics, “oomph” is appropriately translated as “energy”, not “force.”  So, “the ball stopped because the energy ran out” would be the appropriate scientific phrase.  Once we have that shared meaning, then it’s possible for us to communicate to each other what we know, and know that the other person knows that we know.

So, the two teachers in the video, she says, aren’t actually describing and creating shared meaning… yet.  They’re not exploring, they’re still explicitly looking for the “right” words to describe the situation — that’s why the one teacher has a eureka! moment in coming to the word “stored” — they are trying to come to agreement on the correct terminology.  Over the course of other videos later in the series, this kind of “terminology” talk drops off dramatically — its clearly something they’re doing in the beginning of their discussions, to establish the landscape, rather than something they do later on as they’re constructing meaning.

So, Valerie doesn’t disagree with the other researchers and the things that they see, but she claims that the teachers are still defining the problem space that they’re working in.

At the end of the session we had a bit of Q&A, and Valerie and Rosemary argued (productively) about their different perspectives on the video.  I had the same slightly unnerving thought that what I was observing was just what we had been discussing — a discussion with an attempt to arrive at shared meaning and words to describe physical reality.  Apparently I wasn’t the only one with this thought, as someone else stood up and proposed this meta-analysis of the researchers’ discussion. It’s useful and productive for us to discuss teaching and education research, claimed Valerie. We’re making sense of what we see in the classroom.  We may even be coming to agreement on what terminology means, as Valerie claimed that teachers were doing — we may not all have the same idea of what “sensemaking” means (a common education research term), for example.

So, if you’ve read this far… let us know in the comments — how do you define “sensemaking”?

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

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 that there is a real disconnect between the type of energy that we teach about (chemical, potential, kinetic, etc.) and the energy that we care about (Red Bull, SUV’s, wind and solar energy, etc.).  There is, of course, a connection between the two, but we need to help students to build that bridge. Looking around on YouTube he found that young people are spending time, not just taking video of interesting things related to energy, but also having interesting discussions in the comments section of each video.  By looking around at YouTube, he suggested, we can find out what kinds of energy students care about, and see them having (sometimes) productive discussion about those ideas.  For an example, take a look at any of the YouTube videos on the Gaussian Gun.

Sam McKagan described an activity that they’ve created called energy theater. A box is pushed across the floor by a person’s hand.  Our task is to describe what happens in that process.  Each person is a chunk of energy — some people are the energy in the hand, some are in the box.  Each has to describe their energy (chemical, kinetic, potential) with sign language or a colored card.  Different areas in the room correspond to different parts of the scenario — one part of the room is the floor.  They then act out what happens in that process. You can do this with a variety of different types of energy scenarios:  The box is shoved, a box is pulled to the edge of a table by a pulley system, etc.

There are two main models of energy — energy as activation (“I’m energized” or “I have energy”), or energy as substance (the body is a chunk of energy).    Energy as activation can really support a qualitative sense of energy as something that gets things going.  Energy as substance suupports quantitative thinking about energy, and ideas of conservation.  Energy theater forces the idea of energy as a substance – people don’t appear or disappear (so energy is conserved), people place themselves in different areas of the room (energy is located in the body).

Since we understand our world in terms of bodily experiences, and research suggests that it’s helpful to take on the role of an entity for figuring things out, this is a promising approach for conceptual learning in physics. This seems to help students get in touch with the ideas of energy in a way that other representations don’t allow.

Eleanor Close talked about how these activities let us communicate in a wider variety of ways than normal classroom activities do.  For instance, two soccer players having an argument are communicating through words, tone, gesture, posture, symbols (like a referee caard).  A lot of these options aren’t available in a classroom, where students are fixed in place and facing one direction.  Tutorials or small groups have less restriction, but words are still the main way that people communicate meaning in those environments.  Energy theater, on the other hand, allow participants to make use of many more modes of meaning — symbols (cards indicating their type of energy), body orientation, posture, and more.

For example, a box is shoved suddenly across the floor, with energy transferring from the hand to the box.  What happens then?  Participants communicate what they think is happenening.  For example, the participants try to determine what will happen to the energy in the hand as the hand begins to push the box:

“When we push, we turn to green.”

They turn their cards to indicate a change from chemical to kinetic energy.  So, the words suggest that she sees themselves as chunks of energy, changing form. Their symbols, of colored cards, allow them to see if the other people in the room agree (i.e., if they’re flipping their cards to green too).  The teacher also emphasized the word “green”, encouraging others to follow her lead.  All these different modes of communication that participants use during energy theater give us a much richer ability to assess the outcomes of these activities.

Hunter Close then discussed how these activities promote empathy with a hypothetical entity (i.e., energy). Physicists discuss physics in odd ways sometimes.  They’ll say things where they’re clearly identifying as a physicist “I made these measurements” or where they’re talking about an inanimate object, “When it comes down, it’s in the domain state.  But they say odd things that are in between the two:  “When I come down, I’m in the domain state.”  These weird grammatical constructions were not confusing to the physicists.  We do this all the time — we look on a map and say “we are here”.  But no, we’re in this room, in truth.  Still, this kind of talk happens a lot.  This is called “indeterminate construction.”  The original researcher (Ochs, 1996) who looked at how physicists do this suggested that by using these constructions, they’re taking on the role of something that they’re struggling to understand.  It lets us take on the role of something that we’re not, and is especially useful when we’re trying to figure something out as a group.  It’s particularly helpful when were looking at a graphic representation together and trying to make sense of it.  So, what energy theater does is to take on this tool that scientists do and use it in instruction.  Energy theater is designed to involve participants symbolically in the thing that they’re trying to understand.  What he’s found is that when learners pretend to be the energy, they create much more complex diagrams of the scenario than they did when simply discussing energy in the abstract.  What scientists generally do is to understand the natural world, and draw a diagram to represent their understanding of that natural world, and engage with each other symbolically in trying to understand that diagram.  But for new learners, we’re going the other direction — we have the learners engage symbolically in the natural world in order to understand it, and then draw a diagram to represent that understanding after they’ve engaged in that symbolic representation.

Rachel Scherr discussed how these physical activities get cognition out of the head, letting us observe thinking a new way. Consider the scenario where a person is pushing a box on a frictionless surface.  Energy travels from the hand to the box, with none going into the floor.  So, what needs to happen is that some of the chemical energy units in the hand must go into kinetic energy, and then some of those kinetic energy units in the hand must travel to the box.  This is fairly complicated to act out as a group.  How do they figure out what to do so that everything comes out right?  They designated one person to tag people to change from chemical to kinetic energy, and to go from the hand to the box.  A certain kind of tap meant to change form, and another kind of tag meant to move from the hand to the box.  This made the decisions and ideas of the group visible, so that the group and observers could discuss just what was happening during the process of transferring energy.  So, her point is what this group activity does is to take cognition out of an individual’s head, and make it physically explicit in the group’s activities — so we can directly observe the group’s thinking in a way that we can’t when people are just figuring things out on their own.

Very interesting ideas — preliminary, but with promise.

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 ground first?”

Amazingly, a full 40% of his sample said that the one thrown horizontally will hit the ground first!  Any third grader, he said, will give the correct answer to this question (that the one thrown straight down will hit the ground first). So, the ones who give this “silly” answer, he says, are framing this task as an “answermaking” task – where their job is just to get the right answer and use whatever tricks they need to get there.  Since this question has some resemblance to the common physics demo, where a ball is thrown horizontally or dropped vertically, they try to make an answer from that previous information.  Those who answer correctly are in a “sensemaking” mode – they are reasoning through the question, in a variety of ways.  They think their task in physics class is to make sense of what is happening.  They found that they were able to prime students to answer in a certain way depending on how they led into the question.  Different types of initial questions primed the students to think about the thrown-ball question in one of those two ways.  This is good news, it means that if we want students to  engage in certain kinds of activities on the homework, perhaps we should make the first couple questions on the homework strongly leading in that direction.

A follow up talk by Mary McDonald, also at Grinnell, was cancelled, unfortunately, but she investigated what kinds of activities during groupwork can create an answermaking versus a sensemaking frame.  This would be helpful in determining what sorts of things we could emphasize when we’re watching students working together in groups, so that they engage more in making sense of what they’re doing.  My friend Sandy Martinuk (University of British Columbia) has created some interesting work in this area too – he found that students don’t connect what they’re learning to real-life when they’re doing a problem solving activity, even if it’s real-world (like context-rich problems).  They still seem to be engaged in answermaking in that task.  When they’re creating or inventing something by working together, however, they seem go to more into a sensemaking frame of mind.

Luckily, Sandy reads my blog, and hopefully can correct what I believe is a somewhat muddled description of his results!

Phew… end of Day 1… It’s been a very long day.  Stay tuned, tomorrow I’ll be presenting two talks — on clickers, and on social media in physics classrooms.  I’ll do my best to summarize those here!

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 with exhaustion.

The University of Maine PER group (Brian Frank and Adam Kaczynski) showed us a few  of their studies on how students reason in tutorials.

For one, in tutorials, we expect students to articulate their reasoning, and argue and debate ideas.  But this isn’t always easy to do, working in social groups.  Brian Frank showed us some results from one group of girls, which I think must be pretty common.  One student said that she thought that they would see one kind of result when they did the experiment later in the tutorial.  Another disagreed.  The first student sort of laughed uncomfortably and said, oh, “I don’t know.”  She tried several times during the tutorial to bring up her concerns and confusion about that part of the tutorial and the other students either changed the subject, said it didn’t matter whether they all got the same answer, and that student always sort of deflected the potential conflict or loss of face by turning away, playing with her hair, or laughing.  This was a lost opportunity for the students to discuss and articulate their ideas.  I bet this happens a lot.  If articulating and attending to peers’ ideas are important for tutorials, we need to find ways to make this happen in the classroom.  I know at the University of Colorado we have successfully addressed this problem, at least in part, by using undergraduate Learning Assistants to circulate, ask questions f students, and model the kind of reasoning and discussion that we want from our students.

Adam Kacyznski also showed us some data on the fact that students aren’t necessarily using the resources available to them to solve the tutorial problems.  They try to solve inconsistencies as they work through tutorials, but not necessarily between ideas in the tutorial, but rather between their own formulations of the question.  They don’t bring up alternative ideas until that’s modeled by the instructor.  So, students aren’t necessarily being independent learners in quite the way that we expect them to in the tutorials.

Both of these studies suggest what we already knew, but with some more precision – the deep thinking that we expect students to do is difficult, both intellectually and socially.  In the Q&A, it was mentioned that the structure of the tutorials can be complicit in creating this kind of direction – if the answers come later in the tutorial, then students might avoid spending the time to talk about their reasoning because they know it will be resolved later on.

I’ve had the most distressing symptoms over the past week, which sparked my biophysics curiosity.  At first I thought that I was just groggy and out of sorts.  Then I realized that my head didn’t just feel like it was stuffed with cotton, it sounded like it was stuffed with cotton.  I felt disoriented, my head was a bit stuffy, and things didn’t sound quite right.  I was talking to my boyfriend on the phone, and I asked him, “Are you OK?  You sound really weird.”  He sounded like he had a really bad head cold.  He swore he was fine.  He sounded fine when I talked to him in person.  Talking to him on the phone later, he sounded strange again.

Ever the scientist, I realized I needed to try varying some parameters.  I switched the phone to my other ear.  He sounded fine.  Back to my left ear:  He sounded like his nose was plugged.  Back to my right ear:  Normal.  So, there was something odd about my left ear.  It seemed to be cutting out all the high frequencies.  Am I becoming deaf to high frequencies in my left ear?

Later, I go to the climbing gym.  There are many small children laughing.  The high tones in their voices sound weird, mechanical, and like they’re vibrating in the very back of my left ear.  Everything with a high pitch has a mechanical whine that sounds like it’s coming from behind my left shoulder.  Disconcerting.  Weird. And seemingly totally at odds with my observation that my left ear is cutting out the high frequencies on the phone.

I start to notice how different men’s and women’s voices differ.  Men’s voices sound mostly normal.  Women’s voices create that mechanical buzz and are difficult to listen to.  Ambient sound has similar high-pitched buzzes.  I’ve developed my own internal high-frequency monitoring device.  I’m less than thrilled.

So, I go to the doctor to find out what the heck is going wrong with me.  He’s totally gorgeous, a nice perk in the midst of my health troubles.  More science ensues.  He taps a tuning fork on the table and holds it by my left ear (the one that’s acting strangely).  I wince with the loudness of the sound.  He taps it again and holds it against the bone behind my ear.  Is it louder then?  No.  He does the same with my right ear.

Results:

• When the tuning fork is held next to my ear, it’s louder in my left than the right
• When the tuning fork is held on the bone behind my ear, it’s similar loudness in both ears.

So, what’s that mean?  Because it sounds the same when the sound is traveling through my bone rather than through the air, that means that there’s nothing wrong with my auditory nerve (whew!)  But it sounds different when traveling through the air, so that means that something is selectively amplifying the high frequencies as they travel from the air to my auditory nerve.

Apparently what’s wrong is that my eustachian tubes are blocked, creating a high pressure area inside the canals of my ear.  Usually I could clear my ears (getting that “pop”) to equalize the pressure, but if it’s swollen (like if you have a cold) then it’s hard to get my ears to pop.

What struck me about all this experimentation was just how much the scientific method came into play — observe, test, try changing variables, compare.  You can find out a lot just by thoughtfully testing different parameters.

The cute doctor didn’t have much to say about why this caused the odd pitch distortions, so I batted my eyes at him and went off to do my own research.

First, what about when I hear the odd buzzing amplification of high pitched sounds in the air? In that case, the sound must travel through the air to the tympanic membrane, or eardrum.  The eardrum is what transfers the sound from the air to the little bones of the ear (the hammer, anvil and stirrup).  If the eustachian tube is swollen, that restricts the movement of the eardrum.  But that seems like it would reduce my sensitivity to high frequencies, not increase it.  Perhaps, instead, the high pitched vibrations of the eardrum are somehow amplified, maybe via a resonance.  Perhaps the swollen eustachian tube has tuned my hearing to be more sensitive to higher pitches than the normal human ear?

Apparently there is a rare condition where, instead of the tube being swollen shut, the tube is left open, which allows the sound of your own breathing and heartbeat to move from the body directly to the eardrum, so you hear the amplified echo of your own voice and breath.  (Strange medical note:  A new procedure to relieve those symptoms involves placing a small piece of Blu-Tack on the eardrum to muffle the sounds.  “The Blu-Tack has to be replaced at regular intervals,” says Wikipedia.  Ugh.  I guess I could have it worse.

What about when I talk on the phone, and my boyfriend sounded like he had a cold because all the high frequencies were reduced?  In that case, I think, the sound is traveling partially through the air and partially through the bones of my skull. A dampening of the movement of the eardrum by the swollen eustachian tube might explain that (though it wouldn’t explain why the same isn’t true when I’m not talking on the phone, as above).  Or, perhaps, the high-frequency sensitivity only happens with frequencies that are not contained in my boyfriend’s voice.  Perhaps some high frequencies are being amplified, and the rest are cut out?

Obviously, I haven’t managed to find an ultimate answer to my queries.  If anybody has any ideas, or insider knowledge, please share.  This has made me very curious.  If I’m going to be suffering, I might as well learn something new about my body!

Image: Perception Space—The Final Frontier, A PLoS Biology Vol. 3, No. 4, e137 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030137 ([1]/[2]), vectorised by Inductiveload

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 way I left the fold, since I’m no longer a “traditional” bench scientist.  I’m still in science education, and loving it, but what urged me along the science path, what was that force that ended up driving my life in this direction?

People are generally very worried about the state of the scientific enterprise in the US.  We need more scientists in the workforce.  Most people are tackling that problem by addressing the piss-poor levels of scientific literacy — by improving science teaching, for example.  But there is an implied causality there:  If people understand science better, they’ll want to do it for a career.  This study went looking for other things than simply “doing well in science”  that affected whether kids went into science as a career.

There’s a great book called “Talking about Leaving:  Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences” by Seymour and Hewitt.  In interviews, they found that a lot of students — male and female — were turned off by the abstract nature of science classes in college, and the competitive edge.  That seems to be echoed in the general literature — kids often leave science because it doesn’t seem to be a vibrant, interesting field, but rather a boring and autocratically-taught subject.  People who stay in the sciences, on the other hand, have a deep intrinsic interest in the subject that transcends the drill-and-kill that often happens in the school.  They have a spark.

So, what is that spark makes people want to be a scientist?

To answer the question, these researchers interviewed scientists and graduate students in physics and chemistry, and looked for some general themes.  For giggles, I’ll share where I fit into these data.

1.  The Timing of the Spark

The vast majority of people wanted to be a scientist before middle school – though this was more true for the physicists than for the chemists.  About a third had their interest sparked in middle or high school.  A surprising number said that they were “always” interested in science.   Women and men responded roughly the same.

I think that I might fall in that 30% of “in middle school”.  I remember finding out what a physicist was in 8^th grade – someone who “figures out how the world works” and I said that I wanted to do that.  Though my father was a chemist, I don’t recall a lot of interest in science in elementary school.   On the other hand, one respondent’s quote, “I don’t know, my father’s a biologist so I was kind of raised in a house with I guess scientific influence” kind of struck a bell.  So maybe I’m an “always” girl.

What about you, dear reader – when did you become interested in science?

2.  Who instilled the spark?

So, who was responsible for creating that spark?  Most people (45%) said that it was self-generated:

I liked toys like tinker toys and building blocks and taking things apart and seeing how they worked from early on. Science play was kind of more my inclination rather than physical play. (Female, Professor, Chemistry)

Another 40% said that their interest came from school activities, and another 15% from family.  Some said that their families had pressured them into science. But these results were very different for men and women!  More men said that they were motivated by self-interest (57%) whereas most women said they were motivated by school (52%).

I’m pretty sure that I fall into the “school” category, with some small influence of family.  I liked science in school, I was good at it, I was influenced by a few special teachers.  The fact that Dad was a chemist was more of a background support rather than a strong initial factor in my interest.

3.  What was the type of interest?

For about 50% of people interviewed, they were intrinsically interested in science to start with.  So, they tinkered at home with electronics, did experiments at home, and read science or science fiction.  I know I read science fiction, but I was never much of a tinkerer.  I wish that I had been.  I feel I’d be a better scientist now.

Many others (38%) mentioned school activities as sparking their interest, like classes, science projects, and teachers.  Unsurprisingly, teachers really left a mark on several students — either through encouragement or through disparaging words.

Fewer people mentioned family as an important source of interest, but all mentioned them as an important source of support.

Here is the story that sparked the title of the article, indicating the importance of school activities in encouraging a love of science:

When I was in third grade, my teacher did something you couldn’t do in class  anymore—we dissected cow eyes. And I thought it was so cool and so much fun that he sent a bunch of extras home in a paper bag, and reminded me to put them in the fridge  when I got home. And so I did. [When my mom came home she] said, “Hey, how was your day?” I said, “Great!” and I just went about my business and forgot the eyeballs in the fridge. She thought it was leftover lunch and went to open it up, and there were, like, four or five eyes looking back at her. And so all of a sudden I heard this screaming, and I realized what I had done … then from that point I started to really love science.
(Female, PhD student, Chemistry)

So, the take-home messages here are:

• Both men and women get interested in science early.  SO…. efforts to improve secondary level education and interest in science may be misguided!  We need to catch kids younger.
• School experiences are important to many (40%).  Teachers’ support can encourage interest that’s already there, but it can also foster a new love for science.
• Men more often find their initial spark of interest in science within themselves; Women more often find it in school activities.

So, something that we in the museum community have known for a long time — giving kids engaging activities is just as important as teaching them the content they’ll need to know on the test.

The paper concludes:

We used to believe that improving science education meant better training for teachers and increasing student understanding of scientific principles. We assumed that improving instruction and performance would lead to greater numbers of scientists in the pipeline. The results of this analysis make us believe that there are other factors that play a more significant role in getting students to consider careers in science. From the teaching perspective, it seems that including a variety of content and activities to engage students with different interests, providing an engaging classroom environment, and allowing students to feel comfortable asking questions about their understanding are all important factors that can improve student interest in science.

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 students do when they didn’t have time to fully prepare their notes.

But as I kept reading, I started to feel offended.  Almost all the phrases that he was “translating” had to do with education-research-based techniques, and most were poking fun at the technique.  For example:

physics education research: Double-counting teaching as research on your annual faculty activity report.

A quick google of the guy (Carl Mungan) suggests that he’s an insider making jokes about his own topic, since his own publications seem to be in physics education research journals.  But I’m still not so keen on this “let’s make fun of physics education research (PER)” piece.  It seems dangerous.  Many of these jokes are indeed what people think of PER, and making fun of it could suggest that someone else lends creedence to those objections.  I think I wouldn’t be so annoyed if this list were more balanced between general teaching terms and PER terms, but it’s maybe 75% PER.

Guess I’m getting grumpy in my old age.

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.