MST Candidate

Mary Jean Jones
Thesis Advisor: Molly Schauffler
An Abstract of the Thesis Presented
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Master of Science in Teaching

August, 2013

AN ASSESSMENT OF NINTH GRADERS’ USE OF GRAPHS AND EXPLANATIONS TO COMMUNICATE SCIENTIFIC IDEAS

           Proficiency in science learning involves mastering skills and language that are used in communicating about data. Working with data includes analyzing data tables, developing hypotheses, creating graphs, and explaining if and how those graphs support a hypothesis, all of which are part of data literacy. In this study, I examined the extent to which students (a) produced mechanically correct graphs, (b) referred to statistical vocabulary when discussing data and (c) interpreted those graphs by way of producing scientific explanations. After conducting preliminary classroom observations, I selected a survey that aligned with (a) the aspects of data literacy with which students seemed to have difficulties and (b) the current math and science education research. Students tend to perform better at interpreting graphs than constructing them and tend to be lacking in their abilities to produce sufficient evidence and reasoning for their claims. The survey contained two sets of data, each with a hypothesis. Participants were asked to create a graph helping them determine whether or not the data supported the hypothesis. Sixty-four ninth grade students participated in the survey. The majority of students in this study produced mechanically correct graphs. An additional twelve students participated in interviews. Findings from survey and interview data suggest that students can use statistical vocabulary such as mean and range when discussing data but lack the conceptual understanding of those terms to create accurate and adequate scientific explanations.
 

Friday, April 19, 2013
1:00 pm
117 Donald P. Corbett Building

Present an

ORAL THESIS DEFENSE

MST Candidate
Adi Levy Conlogue
Thesis Co-Advisors: Natasha M. Speer and Roy M. Turner

 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Science in Teaching

May 2013

Students’ thinking about recursion:
When do they use it and why?

Recursion is the process of repeating items in a self-similar way. Recursion is a key concept in Computer Science field and is used in programming. It is a powerful tool for solving programming tasks and has features that sometimes make it a superior choice over other approaches. Students learn recursion during their first programming course and other courses throughout the curriculum. Research has shown that recursion is challenging and findings reveal students’ difficulties in understanding and applying it to solve problems. But very little is known about when students choose to use recursion to solve programming tasks and why they do or do not choose to use it. Investigating students’ thinking about the use of recursion is the focus of this study. Participants included 17 undergraduates and three graduate students. Task-based clinical interviews were the sources of data. Findings indicate that students do not write functions that use recursion to solve programming tasks even though they are actually able to successfully use recursion when asked to do so. The analysis sheds some light on various reasons why students who are capable of using recursion choose not to use it. Implications for teaching, limitation of study and further research will be discussed.

Friday, April 12, 2013

11:00 am

130 Little Hall

Presents

Nicole Gillespie, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Knowles Science Teaching Foundation

Inquiry and Teacher Professional Development: Lessons Learned
from the KSTF Teaching Fellowship Program

Recent work argues that professional development intended to develop teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) must be tightly connected with teacher practice (Van Driel & Berry, 2010). Professional development for beginning secondary mathematics and science teachers at the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation (KSTF) involves collaboratively studying a concept and how to teach it. This modified lesson study work situates teacher learning at the intersection of science or mathematics content knowledge, pedagogy and individual classroom practice. In this presentation, I will share KSTF’s practices and lessons learned for two parallel strands of inquiry: beginning science and mathematics teachers’ collaborative inquiry into their own teaching through lesson study, and the fellowship staff’s inquiry into our practice of facilitating and supporting this work. I will conclude with a synthesis of what KSTS has learned about practitioner inquiry more broadly by engaging in this collaborative process.

Bio:

As the Executive Director of the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation, Dr. Nicole Gillespie leads KSTF in its efforts to strengthen the teaching profession and improve the state of US STEM education. Nicole previously directed the KSTF Teaching Fellowship, the foundation’s signature program that supports Teaching Fellows in the fields of biology, physical science and mathematics education nationwide. She joined KSTF in 2004 and has helped develop several of the foundation’s key initiatives, including its Research and Evaluation Program and Alumni Program.

Monday, April 1, 2013
3:00 pm
Arthur St. John Hill Auditorium
Room 165, Engineering and Science Research Building

 Refreshments will be served in the ESRB Lobby at 2:45 pm

MST Candidate

Ryan Weatherbee

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Sara Lindsay

An Abstract of the Thesis Presented
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Master of Science in Teaching

May, 2013

Shedding light on marine science education:
A Cross-Sectional Assessment of Student Content Knowledge in an Undergraduate Marine Science Program

Program-level assessment within undergraduate education provides information on student learning that is not easily accessible from in-class metrics. For example, information about where in a program understanding is obtained and mastered and the degree to which knowledge is retained over time can be measured. This project encompasses the development of an assessment tool for measuring student content knowledge specific to the curriculum of the School of Marine Sciences’ (University of Maine) undergraduate program and evaluation of the assessment results from a full-scale pilot deployment.

Monday, April 8, 2013
9:00 am
Arthur St. John Auditorium
(165 Barrows Hall)

MST Candidate
Evan Chase

Thesis Advisor: Dr. Michael C. Wittmann

An Abstract of the Thesis Presented
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the
Degree of Master of Science in Teaching

May, 2013

 INVESTIGATING PHYSICS STUDENTS’ SIMULTANEOUS USE OF GESTURES & SPEECH TO DESCRIBE MULTIPLE QUANTITIES OF A
VERTICALLY-TOSSED BALL

               While conversing, people typically produce hand gestures which can communicate additional information to the listener. To study how physics students use gestures in addition to their speech to explain a ball being tossed into the air, individual interviews were conducted with physics majors who had completed half of an eight-semester physics program at the University of Maine. These interviews conformed to the standards set by current qualitative education research. Students were asked to discuss kinematic quantities and forces associated with the motion of a ball thrown straight up, both with and without the force of air resistance. Video episodes were selected for detailed analysis which contained moments of students gesturing and speaking simultaneously, such that the referents of the speech and gesture did not appear to match. A more explicit methodology than that found in the current literature on gesture research in physics is defined. This methodology is used to show that these physics students were able to portray information about kinematics and force quantities simultaneously with gestures and speech, and in some cases were able to describe changes in one quantity with a hand and another quantity with the fingers on the same hand.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013
8:30 a.m.
Arthur St. John Hill Auditorium, ESRB
165 Barrows Hall

Shirly Avargil, a current postdoctoral research associate with the Maine Physical Sciences Partnership and the Maine Center for Research in STEM Education, has recently been selected by the NARST Equity and Ethics Committee to receive the Jhumki Basu Equity Scholars Award.  As a 2013 Basu Scholar, she will receive a scholarship that supports the expenses of attending this year’s Annual NARST Conference that will be taking place this March in Puerto Rico.  Only 15 NARST members were chosen to receive this award, which supports advanced-level doctoral students and junior scholars from underrepresented groups in the United States.
The Basu Scholarship program is designed to not only provide a financial award to its recipients, but also to help support and develop their research skills.  This is carried out by requiring recipients to attend the NARST Conference and to participate in the Pre-Conference Workshop.
Avargil’s research focuses on teachers’ conceptions of progress in science education.  She is currently working on several research projects involving pre-service teachers at the University of Maine (teaching partners and chemistry students), and in-service teachers in rural Maine (teacher enactment of new science Framework and knowledge for assessment)

Present

MacKenzie R. Stetzer
Assistant Professor of Physics
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Maine

New insights into student understanding of electric circuits and analog electronics

In recent years, large-scale undergraduate course transformation efforts have become an increasingly visible response to a well-documented need for improved STEM instruction at all levels.  The role that research-validated instructional materials play in such transformations, however, is sometimes overlooked.  As the focus of these efforts shifts from introductory to upper-division courses, there is an increasing need for the kind of in-depth studies of student understanding that may inform the development of effective instructional materials.  In this talk, I present examples from an ongoing, multi-year, multi-institutional investigation of student understanding of electric circuits and analog electronics.  The insights drawn from work conducted in both introductory and upper-division courses continue to guide efforts to minimize the disconnect between what we teach and what students learn in junior-level laboratory courses in analog electronics.

 Monday, March 18, 2013
3:00 – 4:00 pm
Arthur St. John Hill Auditorium
165 Barrows Hall

presents

Lauren Barth-Cohen, Ph.D.
University of California, Berkeley
Post-Doctoral Associate candidate

“Learning by Explaining Complex Systems”

In this talk I present work that focuses on students’ competencies in generating scientific explanations within the domain of complex systems, an interdisciplinary area in which students tend to have difficulties. During open-ended clinical interviews students were asked to reason about a variety of phenomena whose behavior is associated with complex systems. I focus on a case of a students’ shifting explanations as they become less prototypically centralized (a more naïve causality) and then become more prototypically decentralized over short time periods while explaining the movement of sand dunes. The analysis reveals how change can occur during the process of students generating a progression of increasingly sophisticated transitional explanations. This is important because it reveals that this shift may not be as difficult as some have presumed and will serve as a foundation for future work to build an instructional sequence on complex systems.

Bio:
Lauren Barth-Cohen earned a Ph.D. from the Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics Education (SESAME) at the University of California, Berkeley in December 2012 and a BA in physics from Smith College in 2005. She is currently a visiting scholar in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley. Her research interests include learning, conceptual change, scientific explanations, physics education, and video-analysis. In her dissertation she studied students’ learning, in the context of students’ generating scientific explanations about complex systems.

Wednesday, February 27, 2013
12:00-1:30 pm
Arthur St. John Hill Auditorium

Light lunch provided at 12:00 pm
Talk starts at 12:30 pm

Presents

Michelle Smith
Assistant Professor, School of Biology and Ecology
University of Maine

Identifying and Changing Persistent Conceptual Difficulties in Undergraduate Biology Courses

As biology faculty transform their courses to align with the recommendations in the NSF-AAAS report Vision and Change and other national calls to action, it is important that they use valid assessments to measure whether their changes are impacting student learning.  In this talk, I will discuss the development of one such assessment called the Genetics Concept Assessment and show how it has been used to document student conceptual difficulties and measure whether particular incorrect ideas are more likely to persist than other incorrect ideas. In addition, I will discuss the development of a new assessment called Bio-MAPS (Biology-Measuring Achievement and Progression in Science), which is designed to be administered at multiple points in the biology curriculum in order to monitor student progress and enable targeted curricular reform.

Monday, February 18, 2013
3:00 pm
Arthur St. John Hill Auditorium
Room 165, Engineering and Science Research Building

Refreshments will be served in the ESRB Lobby at 2:45 pm

Presents

Erin M. Furtak
Assistant Professor, School of Education
University of Colorado at Boulder

Exploring the Role of Disciplinary Knowledge, Language, and Practices in Collaborative Formative Assessment Design

While Black & Wiliam (e.g. 1998) and others often cast the process of formative assessment as a domain-independent activity, Coffey et al. (2011) and Bennett (2011) have argued that formative assessment design and enactment are best considered within a disciplinary space. We explore the conversations that occurred within a department of high school biology teachers as they engaged in the process of developing, enacting, and revising common formative assessments over the course of two years. Taking videotapes of professional development sessions as our primary data source, we explore the disciplinary aspects of teachers’ conversations and how such disciplinary engagement supported teachers’ generation and revision of the formative assessments.

Erin Marie Furtak, Sara C. Heredia, Deb Morrison & Ian Parker Renga
School of Education, University of Colorado, Boulder

 Bio:
Erin Marie Furtak is Assistant Professor of Education specializing in Science Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She worked as a high school biology and earth science teacher in the public schools near Denver and has experiences in many other venues of education, including middle school, administration of professional development, and curriculum design. Her struggles to successfully implement inquiry-based teaching methods inspired her to pursue a career in educational research to make reforms more attainable for science teachers. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Knowles Science Teaching Foundation, and Spencer Foundation, and has appeared in a number of journals. In the summer of 2012 she was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by President Obama.

Monday, February 4, 2013
3:00 pm
Arthur St. John Hill Auditorium
Room 165, Engineering and Science Research Building

Refreshments will be served in the ESRB Lobby at 2:45 pm