Other education

The teaching of physics to engineering students has remained stagnant for close to a century. In this novel team-based, project-based approach, we break the mold by giving students ownership of their learning. This new course has no standard lectures or exams, yet students’ conceptual gains are significantly greater than those obtained in traditional courses. The course blends six best practices to deliver a learning experience that helps students develop important skills, including communication, estimation, problem solving, and team skills, in addition to a solid conceptual understanding... Read more about Educating 21st Century Innovators

Neurobiology and cognitive psychology have made great progress in understanding how the mind processes information � in particular visual information. The knowledge we can gain from these fields has important implications for the presentation of visual information and student learning

Why is it that stellar students sometimes fail in the workplace while dropouts succeed? One reason is that most, if not all, of our current assessment practices are inauthentic. Just as the lecture focuses on the delivery of information to math and statistics students, so does assessment often focus on having students regurgitate that same information back to the instructor. Consequently, assessment fails to focus on the skills that are relevant in life in the 21st century. Assessment has been called the "hidden curriculum" as it is an important driver of students' study habits. Unless we... Read more about Assessment For and Not Just of Learning

After applying to ten schools, the talk gives an overview of why I chose Harvard for my PhD.

Discussions of teaching -- even some publications -- abound with anecdotal evidence. Our intuition often supplants a systematic, scientific approach to finding out what works and what doesn't work. Yet, research is increasingly demonstrating that our gut feelings about teaching are often wrong. In this talk I will discuss some research my group has done on gender issues in science courses and on the effectiveness of classroom demonstrations.

The College Readiness Assignment Field-Test (CRAFT) project is working to disseminate standalone lessons designed by expert educators to prepare students for college-level success. In this presentation will discuss the heart of the CRAFT project: college readiness assignments (CRAs). We will dissect CRAs and demonstrate how the various parts map to state standards.

Discussions of teaching -- even some publications -- abound with anecdotal evidence. Our intuition often supplants a systematic, scientific approach to finding out what works and what doesn't work. Yet, research is increasingly demonstrating that our gut feelings about teaching are often wrong. In this talk I will discuss some research my group has done on gender issues in science courses and on the effectiveness of classroom demonstrations.

The teaching of physics to engineering students has remained stagnant for close to a century. In this novel team-based, project-based approach, we break the mold by giving students ownership of their learning. This new course has no standard lectures or exams, yet students’ conceptual gains are significantly greater than those obtained in traditional courses. The course blends six best practices to deliver a learning experience that helps students develop important skills, including communication, estimation, problem solving, and team skills, in addition to a solid conceptual understanding... Read more about Flat space, deep learning

The ability to take what is learned in classrooms and apply it within new contexts is the most important skill for 21st century learners. Transfer of learning is the heart of innovation and the core purpose of any educational system. No matter if you are a teacher, an administrator, or policymaker, no matter where in the world you reside and no matter what you teach, this mission of education does not drift. Unfortunately, by the time students arrive at university, after more than 11,000 hours of compulsory schooling, they still have difficulty transferring knowledge across contexts. This is... Read more about How to Transform Learning ... with Teaching

Instructors all over the globe are turning their students' worlds around by flipping their classrooms. In a flipped class, teachers move information coverage out of the lecture hall so that they can better leverage in-class time to address student difficulties and misconceptions. In this interactive webinar, Dr. Julie Schell will flip the workshop by providing brief introductory, pre-workshop activities to participants. She will use responses from these activities in the workshop and discuss the why, what, and how of flipped classrooms by confronting and resolving a series common myths about... Read more about Flipping the Classroom: How to Turn Your Students' World Right-side Up

The Principles and Practice of Physics is a groundbreaking new calculus-based introductory physics textbook that uses a unique organization and pedagogy to allow students to develop a true conceptual understanding of physics alongside the quantitative skills needed in the course. The book organizes introductory physics around the conservation principles and provides a unified contemporary view of introductory physics. In this talk we will discuss the unique architecture of the book, the conservation-laws-first approach, and results obtained with this book.

Neurobiology and cognitive psychology have made great progress in understanding how the mind processes information – in particular visual information. The knowledge we can gain from these fields has important implications for the presentation of visual information and student learning.

The teaching of physics to engineering students has remained stagnant for close to a century. In this novel team-based, project-based approach, we break the mold by giving students ownership of their learning. This new course has no standard lectures or exams, yet students’ conceptual gains are significantly greater than those obtained in traditional courses. The course blends six best practices to deliver a learning experience that helps students develop important skills, including communication, estimation, problem solving, and team skills, in addition to a solid conceptual understanding... Read more about Flat space, deep learning