Education Commons^™

Community College Consortium Promotes Open Educational Practices Through Outreach And Collaboration, Una T. Daly, Lisa Storm, Barbara Illowsky

SJSU Open Access Conference

The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) is a community of practice focused on awareness and promoting best practices for OER discovery and adoption including open textbooks, open MOOCs, and open repositories to enhance learning and teaching. Through monthly outreach webinars with OER leaders and online advisory meetings, the community shares their projects and expertise encouraging collaboration across institutions, disciplines, and higher education sectors. Hear from the consortium director and two leaders of the community college OER movement.

• Una Daly, Director of Community College Outreach, OpenCourseWare Consortium. Building a community to promote awareness and shared knowledge of …

Variation Of Instructor-Student Interactions In An Introductory Interactive Physics Course, Emily West, Cassandra Paul, David Webb, Wendell Potter

Faculty Publications

The physics instruction at UC Davis for life science majors takes place in a long-standing reformed large-enrollment physics course in which the discussion or laboratory instructors (primarily graduate student teaching assistants) implement the interactive-engagement (IE) elements of the course. Because so many different instructors participate in disseminating the IE course elements, we find it essential to the instructors’ professional development to observe and document the student-instructor interactions within the classroom. Out of this effort, we have developed a computerized real-time instructor observation tool (RIOT) to take data of student-instructor interactions. We use the RIOT to observe 29 different instructors for …

Students Talk About Energy In Project- Based Inquiry Science, Benedikt W. Harrer, Virginia J. Flood, Michael C. Wittmann

Faculty Publications

We examine the types of emergent language eighth grade students in rural Maine middle schools use when they discuss energy in their first experiences with Project-Based Inquiry Science: Energy, a research-based curriculum that uses a specific language for talking about energy. By comparative analysis of the language used by the curriculum materials to students’ language, we find that students’ talk is at times more aligned with a Stores and Transfer model of energy than the Forms model supported by the curriculum.

Productive Resources In Students’ Ideas About Energy: An Alternative Analysis Of Watts’ Original Interview Transcripts, Benedikt W. Harrer, Virginia J. Flood, Michael C. Wittmann

Faculty Publications

For over 30 years, researchers have investigated students’ ideas about energy with the intent of reforming instructional practice. In this pursuit, Watts contributed an influential study with his 1983 paper “Some alternative views of energy” [Phys. Educ. 18, 213 (1983)]. Watts’ “alternative frameworks” continue to be used for categorizing students’ non-normative ideas about energy. Using a resources framework, we propose an alternate analysis of student responses from Watts’ interviews. In our analysis, we show how students’ activated resources about energy are disciplinarily productive. We suggest that fostering seeds of scientific understandings in students’ ideas about energy may play an important …