Previous Events

2018

2018 Schedule (all rooms in Orchard Commons, 6363 Agronomy Road):

  • 8:30am-9:00am – Coffee (ORCH 1001)
  • 9:00am-9:10am – Opening remarks (ORCH 1001)
  • 9:15am-11:45pm – Research round-tables (ORCH 3004, 3016, 3058), please see full schedule below. You are welcome to attend presentations in different rooms.
    • 9:15am – Presenter 1
    • 9:50am – Presenter 2
    • 10:20am – Coffee
    • 10:40am – Presenter 3
    • 11:15am – Presenter 4
  • 11:50am-1:00pm – Lunch (Open Kitchen, North end of the first floor of ORCH): provided for registered participants
    • Note: You will be able to order the lunch of your choosing at this cafeteria and then can proceed through the line of a designated teller where payment has been arranged.
  • 1:00pm-4:00pm – Plenaries (ORCH 1001), with a coffee break and discussion time. The plenaries are open to unregistered participants.
    • 1:00pm: Amy Robertson, Seattle Pacific University, “University Student Conceptual Resources for Understanding Physics” (Abstract)
    • 2:00pm: Eleanor Sayre, Kansas State University, “Fostering inclusivity and equity in the classroom” (Abstract)

People are invited to participate in the research round-tables as presenters or participants. Each small-group will have 4 or 5 presenters plus additional participants. Presenters will each have 30 minutes to engage their group, by presenting (short presentation, extended discussion) on one of their research projects in order to receive feedback from the rest of the group. This is a great opportunity to receive critical feedback from a new audience on a project at any stage, from inception through to dissemination. The audience expertise will skew toward Physics Education Research, but projects and participants related to Discipline-Based Education Research in all STEM fields are invited and welcome.

Pleanary Abstracts

Amy D. Robertson, Seattle Pacific University, “University Student Conceptual Resources for Understanding Physics”

Research focusing on common student ideas in physics has focused in large part on what students misunderstand, find challenging, or do not do.  In this talk, I will introduce a project that is seeking to identify some of the common resources that students use to reason about forces and mechanical waves – that is, some of the ways that students are reasoning that are continuous with formal physics and that can be built on in physics instruction.  In addition to considering examples of student resources for understanding forces, we will interactively explore whether framing student ideas as resources affects (1) instruction and (2) the common student ideas that researchers report.

Eleanor Sayre, Kansas State University, “Fostering inclusivity and equity in the classroom”

What classroom practices support everyone in the classroom? How can we tell when a learning environment is equitable? How can we adjust our policies and teaching methods to better support diverse learners? In this workshop, we blend results from education research with practice: active listening, equitable policies, and supporting diverse learners. This workshop is aimed at faculty and classroom instructors as well as researchers in Discipline-Based Education Research.

Research round-table schedule

Group 1 – ORCH 3004
9:15-9:45 Rob MacDuff Math and Science education is mainly taught from a procedural/computational perspective. In order to speed up the learning processes, just consider the amount of knowledge created every hour, another type of understanding needs to be developed and taught. This alternative is structural understanding. How do we introduce an entirely new approach to knowing and understanding, where the formulas become detailed descriptions of what is being observed.
9:50-10:20 Dan Phelps An example of helping students to understand some ideas associated with basic mechanics using “white board groups and activities”.
10:40-11:10 Deborah Good In 2017, we implemented a sequence of inquiry-based labs in ASTR 101, to increase students’ learning, scientific identity, and use of scientific practices. I am interested in considering ways to improve implementation and assessment to better achieve our goals and understand the results of the activities.
11:15-11:45 Sarah Perez PhET study looking at inquiry skills through logging of student interactions with the simulation
Group 2 – ORCH 3016
9:15-9:45 Analise Hofmann Student surveys and focus groups on group-exams to develop best practice recommendations.
9:50-10:20 Richard Wong Intercultural training and Low stake formative group work in culturally-diverse groups
10:40-11:10 Jeff Bale Virtual vs physical lab comparisons: a discussion about the results, and possible implications of teaching.
11:15-11:45 Jonathan Massey-Allard In class inquiry activities using virtual labs and/or contrasting cases. Feedback for analyzing data and framing story
Group 3 – ORCH 3058
9:15-9:45 James Charbonneau Physics 170 (Statics for Engineers) transformation
9:50-10:20 Lindsay Forestell Discussing the data collected on instructional team locations as it affects student engagement in a first year physics course. How else can we interpret the results?
10:40-11:10 Joe Muise Problem-solving dice: a tool to help students work on the mechanics of solving gravitation problems without having to worry too much about context
11:15-11:45 Georg Rieger In our blended introductory physics course at UBC, all online materials from the distance course are also used in the corresponding face-to-face sections on campus. The course materials are free to students and are based on the ‘College Physics’ textbook from open stax, which was customized into weekly readings. The end-of-chapter textbook problems and previous exam questions were coded directly into the edX.edge platform and form the database for bi-weekly tests, as well as the weekly homework sets. We are currently evaluating what students think about the materials, in particular the open textook and the frequent-testing approach.