HOW COLLABORATIVE LEARNING AFFECTS STUDENT PERCEPTION AND COMPREHENSION OF ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION IN AN INTRODUCTORY ASTRONOMY CLASS

This research explores student perception of collaborative learning and comprehension of electromagnetic radiation in a university level introductory astronomy class. Collaborative learning is an instructional strategy in which small groups of students complete a common task such as answering a question, discussing a concept, creating a presentation, or conducting an experiment. Collaborative learning changes students\u27 and teachers\u27 roles in classrooms by shifting the focus from the teacher to the student-centered collaborative group. Collaborative learning may support students’ comprehension of the course material through peer discussion and input, in order to construct knowledge with the help of their peers. This research seeks to explore student perception of collaborative learning in an introductory astronomy class through case study. Also, student comprehension of electromagnetic radiation is assessed by pretest and posttest. A review of the literature shows that while there have been extensive studies on collaborative learning, the effects of collaborative learning in the discipline of astronomy at the university level have not been widely researched. The analysis of the quantitative data supports collaborative learning as a means of improving student comprehension. Observation of student engagement in collaborative learning as well as participant interviews indicate that students generally hold a positive perception of working in a small collaborative group environment, but they found collaborative interaction in a large expert group to be problematic, stressful, and detrimental to the collaborative learning process

Determining the Locations of Dust Sources in FeLoBAL Quasars

We conduct a spectroscopic search of quasars observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) with broad absorption line (BAL) troughs due to Mg II and troughs due to Fe II that simultaneously exhibit strong Balmer narrow emission lines (NELs). We find that in a redshift range of 0.4 less than or equal to z less than or equal to 0.9 approximately 23 of the 70 Mg II BALs and 4 of a subset of 15 Fe II BALs exhibit strong Balmer emission. We also find significant fractions of Mg II BALs (approximately 23%) and those Mg II BALs with Fe II troughs (approximately 27%) have strong continuum reddening, E(B - V) greater than or equal to 0.1. From measurements of the Balmer decrement in three objects, we find similarly significant reddening of the NEL region in three of the four objects; the NELs in the fourth object are not measurable. We also include one object in this study not taken from the SDSS sample that shows Fe II absorption and strong narrow emission, but due to measurement uncertainty and low continuum reddening the comparison is consistent but inconclusive. We find a trend in both the Mg II and Fe II BAL samples between the NEL reddening and continuum reddening. Because the narrow line reddening is consistent with the continuum reddening in every object in the two SDSS samples, it suggests that the reddening sources in these objects likely exist at larger radial distances than the narrow line regions from the central nucleus.Comment: 40 manuscript pages, accepted in ApJ (July