SoTL Presentations by LMU Faculty
Curtis Bennett, Jacqueline Dewar, Suzanne Larson, Blake Mellor and Thomas Zachariah, “Multiple Facets of Quantitative Literacy,” International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, November 9, 2006 (panel presentation)
V. P. Coletta and J. A. Phillips, “Students’ Reasoning Skills, Personal Epistemologies and Success In Physics”, Carnegie Colloquium. Madison (2006).
Our project seeks to identify characteristics of students who may be at risk for failure in introductory physics. Even in “successful” courses, where the class-average gain on conceptual pre- and post-tests is high, some students do not show any improvement. Our focus is on students’ scientific reasoning skills, such as proportional reasoning, and their views of learning. Both factors are equally important in students’ understanding of abstract concepts. We have investigated the connections between students’ cognitive skills, epistemology beliefs and gains on the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), which measures a student’s conceptual, not computational, understanding of Newtonian Mechanics. Using Lawson’s Classroom test of Scientific Reasoning to assess students’ cognitive skills, we see a significant correlation with the FCI gains. In particular, the proportional reasoning questions show the strongest correlation with conceptual gains. A subset of the population was also given an epistemology survey that drew from several existing questionnaires (Epistemological Beliefs in Physical Science, Maryland Physics Expectations Survey and Schommer’s Epistemology Questionnaire). Several sections of this survey also showed significant correlations with FCI gains, yet no significant correlation with the cognitive measures. We will present an overview of the correlations, several case studies, and discuss possible implications for instruction.
V. P. Coletta and J. A. Phillips, “How Do Cognitive Development and Personal Epistemologies Relate to Success in Introductory Physics?”, Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Institute. Chicago (2005).
In this project, I will examine cognitive and metacognitive factors and their relationship to students’ success in introductory physics. Several existing surveys (Lawson Test of Classroom Reasoning, Epistemological Beliefs in Physical Science, Maryland Physics Expectations Survey and Schommer’s Epistemology Questionnaire), will be used to probe students’ skill set and views of learning. Students’ success in physics will be gauged using a standard conceptual test (Force Concept Inventory) via pre and post testing. Also, student solutions to context-rich problems will be studied for sophistication. These problems are the most difficult for students, as they typically cannot be solved with techniques used by novices. With sufficient feedback most students are able to solve these problems by the end of the semester. The long-term goal of this project is to develop additional instructional materials that target the specific needs of the students who are the most likely to struggle with problem solving and conceptual understanding.
V. P. Coletta and J. A. Phillips, “Effects of Cognitive Skills and Personal Epistemologies on Conceptual Gains”, Summer Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers. Salt Lake (2005).
We have investigated the connections between students' conceptual gains, as measured by the Force Concept Inventory, and their cognitive skills and epistemology beliefs. Using Lawson's Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning to assess students' cognitive skills, we see a significant correlation with the FCI gains (p<0.0001). In particular, the proportional reasoning questions show the strongest correlation with conceptual gains. A subsection of the population was also given an epistemology survey that drew from several existing questionnaires. We will present an overview of the correlations, several case studies, and discuss possible implications for instruction.
Kam D. Dahlquist (presenter) and John David N. Dionisio
An Open Source Framework for Teaching Bioinformatics
Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC), Vienna, Austria, July 2007
Abstract:
Bioinformatics training can be categorized into three areas: tool use, algorithm design/theoretical foundations, and program development. Courses emphasizing tool use are usually targeted at biologists, while courses emphasizing algorithm design and theoretical foundations are usually targeted at computer scientists. However, there are few (if any) reports of courses that explicitly address how to teach the best practices of software development for scientific computing. Pedagogical practices in computer science itself are frequently disconnected from the expectations and skill sets required of computer scientists in industry or interdisciplinary research groups. Computer science undergraduates typically work alone instead of in a team, produce isolated programs from scratch instead of large modular projects, and throw away their code after the assignment has been graded instead of maintaining it over an extended period of time. Open source principles, culture, and tools can be leveraged to teach best practices of software development, including up-front project design, program and process documentation, quality control, data standards, and project management. Here we describe the implementation of an open source teaching framework for bioinformatics that grew out of the Recourse computer science curriculum development project at LMU (
http://recourse.cs.lmu.edu/).
One mechanism by which the open source culture can be adapted to a bioinformatics curriculum is to give students an authentic problem to solve with software, one that is large enough to require a team effort. XMLPipeDB (
http://xmlpipedb.cs.lmu.edu/) is an open source suite of Java-based tools for automatically building relational databases from an XML schema (XSD). XMLPipeDB was developed by graduate students as part of a team-taught course in bioinformatics that was then extended into a second workshop course on open source software development. Throughout this project, students were expected to uphold best practices of software development. The students were asked to perform up-front project design and program and process documentation. Quality control came in the form of code reviews and bug tracking. The project itself utilized XML data standards and was managed by the instructors with cycles of design reviews, setting of milestones, and evaluation of results. The students used open source tools throughout. Each student chose their own development environment (e.g., Eclipse, NetBeans, text editor + ant, etc.) but worked as a team from a SourceForge-hosted repository. The added benefit of this open source teaching framework is that it facilitates the long-term management of course projects beyond the current semester and class. This framework enabled the students to gain real world experience with open source software development and proficiency with tools widely used by the open source community, while making a concrete contribution to an open source software project.
Link to slides on Slideshare
http://www.slideshare.net/bosc/an-open-source-framework-for-teaching-bioinformatics
Blake Mellor, “How Does a Course in the Mathematics of Symmetry Affect Students in the Liberal Arts?,” MAA MathFest, San Jose, August 2007
Blake Mellor, “Mathematics of Symmetry, an Experimental Core Mathematics Course,” BIRS Workshop on Innovations in Mathematics Education via the Arts, Banff, Canada, January 22, 2007
Blake Mellor, “Collaborative Learning in Calculus I,” PMET Workshop, SUNY Oswego, NY, June 2004
Stephanie Fitchett (Wilkes Honors College, Florida Atlantic University) and Blake Mellor, “Discovery-based Science and Mathematics in an Environmental Context,” MAA Poster Session on Projects supported by the NSF DUE, Joint Mathematics Meetings, Phoenix, January 7-10, 2004