In my original goal statement, I declared “I now want to step back and be a part of the science education research that I used to better reach my students.” My vision was to accomplish this by working “with new science teachers, specifically physics teachers.” In that original statement, I noted that I wanted to help teachers “implement best practices from current science education research into their lessons.” My observation then was that “science education research is changing the way we teach, and it is often not the way that we were taught.” My classes have only enhanced by desire to work with physics teachers to make physics more accessible to students and develop methods and strategies to make physics concepts easier to understand. In this “step back”, I have been able to look at teaching from the perspective of a researcher and teacher educator, rather than a physics teacher. This professional goal narrows into two foci: understanding how students learn physics and researching how to better support physics teachers.
My specialization of science education research will help me to better understand the first part of my professional goal: how students learn and understand physics. I have started this branch of my studies by researching conceptual change models as a way to understand how students bring their prior knowledge and experiences into the classroom and use these ideas to shape their understanding. It is important for students to bring these prior ideas and experiences out into the open and use them to “wrestle” with the new concepts.
This will hopefully continue to lead me towards my dissertation topic. Currently, I hope to create a problem-solving template that incorporates conceptual reasoning. Physics teachers tend to heavily use problem solving to teach physics concepts, but problem solving tends to emphasize algebra manipulation, rather than conceptual understanding. By creating a problem-solving template that incorporates conceptual into the problem-solving process, problem-solving could be used as a tool to increase students’ conceptual understanding. I envision using a quantitative approach to compare scores on an assessment measuring conceptual understanding of a class who uses this new problem-solving template to a class that uses a more traditional problem-solving template. I plan on taking both Advanced Applications of Quantitative Methods as well as Mixed Methods Research: Integrating Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches to learn the tools that I will need to complete the analysis.
In addition to understanding how students learn science, it is important to understand how teachers teach and learn to teach science. Developing a new, effective teaching methods is only useful if you can teach teachers to use it. This is where the second part of my professional goal fits in: researching how to better support physics teachers. For both EDUC 850: The Study of Teaching and EDUC 851: Research on Teacher Education, I have worked to research the importance of mentors for supporting physics teachers. I look forward to also taking EDUC 803: Teacher Preparation and Professional Development and EDUC 876: Teacher Development and Education Policy to learn about working with teachers in professional development situations.
Through my graduate research assistant (GRA) position with Dr. Erin Peters-Burton, I have been able to experience different aspects of the research process that I have not (yet) experienced in my classes. Already, I have had the opportunity to work on two different projects. One research project is looking at student responsibility for learning in STEM schools. I have had the opportunity to organize and code work samples from multiple STEM schools, analyze the data using a rubric, and begin to write a paper for publication. In addition, I had the opportunity to lead a teacher interactive session at National STEM Education Research and Practice Summit and presented on the research aspect of the project at the ASTE conference in January.
The second project gave me the interesting perspective as I joined the research project on self-regulated learning (SRL) and the nature of science (NOS) towards the end of the writing process. With this project, in addition to helping with the paper, I analyzed multiple data sources using NOS, emotion, evaluation, and in vivo coding. These experiences are invaluable and I look forward to continuing to grow my research experience during my three years of support as a GRA with the Dean’s Scholar in the College of Education and Human Development Research.
I am very excited about the opportunities that I have had to engage in both classroom discussion and research. I am looking forward to the continued growth in learning as well as the narrowing down of my next step.