From A Systematic Investigation of Faculty-Produced Think-Pair-Share Questions to Frameworks for Characterizing and Developing Fluency-Inspiring Activities

Our investigation of 353 faculty-produced multiple-choice Think-Pair-Share questions leads to key insights into faculty members' ideas about the discipline representations and intellectual tasks that could engage learners on key topics in physics and astronomy. The results of this work illustrate that, for many topics, there is a lack of variety in the representations featured, intellectual tasks posed, and levels of complexity fostered by the questions faculty develop. These efforts motivated and informed the development of two frameworks: (1) a curriculum characterization framework that allows us to systematically code active learning strategies in terms of the discipline representations, intellectual tasks, and reasoning complexity that an activity offers the learner; and (2) a curriculum development framework that guides the development of activities deliberately focused on increasing learners' discipline fluency. We analyze the faculty-produced Think-Pair-Share questions with our curriculum characterization framework, then apply our curriculum development framework to generate (1) Fluency-Inspiring Questions, a more pedagogically powerful extension of a well-established instructional strategy, and (2) Student Representation Tasks, a brand new type of instructional activity in astronomy that shifts the responsibility for generating appropriate representations onto the learners. We explicitly unpack and provide examples of Fluency-Inspiring Questions and Student Representation Tasks, detailing their usage of Pedagogical Discipline Representations coupled with novel question and activity formats.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, accepted to "Physical Review Physics Education Research Focused Collection Curriculum Development: Theory into Design

A New Lecture-Tutorial for Teaching about Molecular Excitations and Synchrotron Radiation

Light and spectroscopy are among the most important and frequently taught topics in introductory, college-level, general education astronomy courses. This is due to the fact that the vast majority of observational data studied by astronomers arrives at Earth in the form of light. While there are many processes by which matter can emit and absorb light, Astro 101 courses typically limit their instruction to the Bohr model of the atom and electron energy level transitions. In this paper, we report on the development of a new Lecture-Tutorial to help students learn about other processes that are responsible for the emission and absorption of light, namely molecular rotations, molecular vibrations, and the acceleration of charged particles by magnetic fields.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures Accepted for publication in The Physics Teache

Using graphical and pictorial representations to teach introductory astronomy students about the detection of extrasolar planets via gravitational microlensing

The detection and study of extrasolar planets is an exciting and thriving field in modern astrophysics, and an increasingly popular topic in introductory astronomy courses. One detection method relies on searching for stars whose light has been gravitationally microlensed by an extrasolar planet. In order to facilitate instructors' abilities to bring this interesting mix of general relativity and extrasolar planet detection into the introductory astronomy classroom, we have developed a new Lecture-Tutorial, "Detecting Exoplanets with Gravitational Microlensing." In this paper, we describe how this new Lecture-Tutorial's representations of astrophysical phenomena, which we selected and created based on theoretically motivated considerations of their pedagogical affordances, are used to help introductory astronomy students develop more expert-like reasoning abilities.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in the American Journal of Physic

Educational testing of an auditory display regarding seasonal variation of martian polar ice caps

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Boston, MA, July 7-9, 2003.During Fall 2002, planetary scientists and astronomy education researchers from the University of Arizona and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory collaborated with composer Marty Quinn of Design Rhythmics Sonification Research Lab in New Hampshire to create both a visual and auditory display of recent gamma ray data from Mars. This product will be used both to highlight the value of data from the current Mars 2001 Odyssey mission and to serve as a testbed for research into the use and effectiveness of auditory displays in science education. This paper provides background on the Mars data presented, an overview of the animation/sonification product, preliminary results from educational testing of the product, and future research plans. The authors hope to present both the sonification and preliminary results of educational research at the ICAD conference this summer