Friday Workshops

The 2019 SABER West meeting will include four optional full day or half day Friday workshops.

Friday workshop attendees are responsible for arranging their own transportation to the UCI campus. If you are staying at the conference hotel, they have a free shuttle (depending on availability). A trip to campus using Uber or Lyft is in the $10 range. For those driving, a one day parking pass costs $13. Workshop location and the relevant parking lot(s) will be provided by your workshop facilitators closer to the meeting date.

*Registration Closed* Michelle Smith and Erin Vinson: CourseSource Writing Studio Workshop: Developing your innovative classroom activities for publication in CourseSource

CourseSource is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes tested, evidence-based undergraduate biology activities. The articles include details in a format, style, and voice that supports replicability. Publishing activities in CourseSource provides authors with recognition of the creativity, experience, and time needed to develop effective classroom materials, while also supporting the dissemination of evidence-based teaching practices. Authors can list CourseSource articles in the peer-reviewed publication section of their curriculum vitae and use them as evidence for excellence in teaching.

In this workshop, we will help prospective CourseSource authors learn about the journal and submission guidelines. We will go through each section of a CourseSource manuscript and provide helpful hints. Prospective authors will have time to work in small groups on manuscript ideas, receive feedback from peers, and ask questions of the editorial staff. Participants will work through a manuscript planning worksheet including all the components of a CourseSource Lesson article: learning goals, introduction, scientific teaching themes, lesson plan, supporting materials, and teaching discussion

We will also explore how current and future CourseSource authors can highlight their publications in job applications, teaching philosophy statements, and tenure and promotion documents. We will share how journal metrics such as number of views and downloads can be highlighted and collaborations with co-authors can provide evidence for institutional change. Finally, we will highlight examples of how authors can publish articles in education research journals such as Life Sciences Education and the corresponding instructional materials (e.g., clicker questions, lesson plans, web tools) in CourseSource.

9:00am-4:00pm Breakfast and Lunch Provided

Application for the CourseSource workshop is now closed. Accepted applicants will be notified shortly.

Dan Grunspan: Getting started with social network analysis using R

Social network analysis (SNA) offers both theory and methods that can be applied to many questions in discipline-based education research. Within DBER fields, SNA has been used to study instructor discussion patterns, student interactions, relationships in undergraduate research experiences, amongst other topics. SNA provides valuable tools and lenses for DBER, but many researchers lack training in SNA methods and the statistical packages available to analyze social network data.

This workshop will provide an introduction to social network analysis. This includes an overview of what SNA is, when SNA tools are applicable to a research project, and a hands-on lesson on using R to analyze network data. Participants will work through a series of activities involving social network data structures, reading and manipulating data in the R environment, extracting different indices and variables specific to SNA, and running hypotheses tests that take into consideration the interdependent nature of social network data.

This workshop will not provide an exhaustive review of social network analysis. The main goal of this workshop is to have participants prepared to continue their own education in SNA through provided code and external resources, and start planning their own SNA research projects.

12:00-4:00pm Lunch provided ($25 for participants)

Jeff Schinske: Bio Ed Research at Community Colleges: Exploring Opportunities, Building Collaborations, and Getting the Most out of SABER West

Nearly half of all undergraduates are enrolled at community colleges (CCs), including the majority of students representing groups presently underserved in the sciences. Yet, only a small minority of studies published in biology education research (BER) journals involve CC biology students, faculty, courses, or authors. Thankfully, many CC instructors are excited to engage in BER to share their interventions and showcase their students’ voices and perspectives.

At this workshop, participants will build community with instructors from a diverse array of CCs to explore opportunities in CC BER and identify potential collaborations based on geographic similarity and research interests. Participants will further engage in discussions surrounding a sample of studies that illustrate common BER research strategies/methods they can expect to hear about at SABER West. Finally, participants will reflect on how they plan to use their workshop experiences to fully engage in the SABER West meeting and move forward on exploring their BER questions of interest.

1:00-4:00pm Snacks and coffee provided ($15 for participants)

*Registration Closed - Email bsato@uci.edu to be added to waitlist* Kameryn Denaro: R for Novice Education Researchers

R is a free and powerful statistical computing language. Most courses that teach R start with an esoteric computer science lecture and sample data about cars. THIS course will provide busy faculty and graduate students with tools to analyze actual classroom data to start you on the path to using quantitative methodologies to conduct education research. It will relate concepts in Excel with programs in R. Part 1 is an introduction to R through the lens of classroom teaching, Part 2 introduces R for analysis of classroom data for education researchers. Attendees are expected to be novices to R.

9:30am-4:00pm Morning coffee/tea and Lunch provided ($35 for participants)