This morning’s plenary was by KC Cole on her new book Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the world he made up

As anyone who knows one whit about me recognizes, this talk about Frank Oppenheimer and his creation of the Exploratorium was deeply significant to me. I was a postdoc under Paul Doherty […]

Today’s session is about using interactive lecture demonstrations to effectively improve your students’ understanding of concepts.
As I mentioned in my previous post, while students like demos, they don’t get the things we want them to get unless they predict the results of the experiement or somehow get involved. David Sokoloff showed how they have […]

This session is about how using discrepant (or “surprising”) events to teach physics

There’s quite a bit of evidence showing that students don’t really get what we want them to get from demonstrations, but they do like them. They get a lot more out of them if we ask them to predict the results of […]

This session is about how some institutions have sustained change in their courses, and what are the central features of changes that stick: Eugenia Etkina (Rutgers), Steven Pollock (CU Boulder), Charles Henderson (Western Michigan).

The NSF will provide money to create reforms, but individual institutions have to figure out how to make them stick. […]

This session is about the state of affairs regarding women in physics and how we can address it.
Well, no surprise, there’s still a big disparity between the number of men and women in physics — we lose women from physics at every major transition — from HS to college, college to graduate school — […]

This session is about how we prepare our undergraduates for graduate school — what to consider, and how we’re doing.
One thing to consider, in thinking about the goals of our undergraduate majors, is that we actually don’t want to prepare all of our undergraduates for graduate school. Physics is a liberal arts degree, […]

Teaching in Urban Schools - Katya Denisova - Science Coordinator, Baltimore Public Schools.

This was a talk about factors to consider when teaching science in schools with high poverty levels. Baltimore has a large poverty rate (30% of kids under 18 live in poverty if I understood her statistic right, though that seems high), […]

Today’s session is all about using diagnosis, or assessment, in your teaching (”Designing a Diagnostic Learning Environment in the Pre-College Classroom”; Lezlie DeWater, Eleanor Close, and Hunter Close).
In the last post I talked about one way to elicit students ideas, using a video and brainstorm. This time, they gave us a bunch of pull-back […]

For the next several days I’ll be liveblogging from the AAPT conference. Below are my posts on today’s session on diagnostic learning environments.
Today’s session is all about using diagnosis, or assessment, in your teaching (”Designing a Diagnostic Learning Environment in the Pre-College Classroom:; Lezlie DeWater, Eleanor Close, and Hunter Close).
Formative assessment is assessment that […]

I’ve got two interviews on the last two Science podcasts — July 10th and 17th — one about nuclear waste management and one is an interesting little story about how tiger moths emit a sound that actually jams bat’s sonar, to keep from getting eaten. Here’s the link. I come in around 13:40 on […]