Education Commons^™

Motivation For Achievement And Attitudes Toward Mathematics Instruction In A Required Calculus Course At The Norwegian University Of Science And Technology, Donna Sundre, Carol Barry, Vidar Gynnild, Erin Tangen Ostgard

Donna L. Sundre

This study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) examines students’ learning goals and attitudes toward mathematics in a first-year calculus course in undergraduate engineering education. Achievement motivation research using the Achievement Goal Questionnaire (AGQ) is advanced from current literature with two additions: (1) a course specific context using introductory college calculus students, and (2) participation of Norwegian students. Pre- and posttest measures of attitudes indicate that students do change learning goals over time, unfortunately opposite to the instructors’ aspirations. A significant increase in “Mastery Avoidance” and “Work Avoidance” was accompanied with a drop in “Mastery Approach” and …

Integration Of Ethics Across The Curriculum: From First Year Through Senior Seminar, Gail E. Gasparich, Larry Wimmers

Gail Gasparich

Innovative Representations Of Light, Behaving As Both Particles And Waves, Among The Paintings Of Monet And Renoir, Charles Smith

Charles Kay Smith

Monet and Renoir, friends collaborating in open air about 1865, discovered that sunlight filtering through a canopy of tree leaves does not produce the splotches and dapples that studio artists conventionally represented at the time but circles of light. Sometimes the circles of light punctuating the shade are clear, separate and crisp, as though light is being propagated as particles, but if the pin-hole gaps between leaves are very close together, they will project compound or superimposed circles that look like the waves that Thomas Young saw in his double slit experiment in 1803-4. Newton’s Opticks published in 1704 had …

Student Experience 14: "So What?", Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

This activity is designed to encourage students to question their own learning and the implications that learning has to them as well as to the broader community. For example: How will this knowledge, these skills and these concepts influence individual lives and the life of the community? What impact does this have on the environment? The activity also helps teachers to reflect about the relevance of lessons within their own curriculum and appropriateness of their teaching strategies. And it is a way for students to take the concepts and apply them in new ways making them more relevant.

Student Experience 03: Photo Points, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Students learn about using photogrammy (making multiple identical images of a location taken with a camera whose relative position is known to a certain degree of accuracy) to monitor change over time. This set of activities within the following lesson will help students learn about the process of collecting identical images and its importance, and practice collecting images from set locations, first in their own environments and then in the field. With this background, students can participate in photo point data collection during their expedition on Geology Day, and have a better understanding of the importance of this data collection. …

Student Experience 02: Powers Of Ten Background, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Powers of Ten (P10) refers to scale. This scale can be an excellent tool to use when framing observations. In other words, P10 is a way of putting objects being observed into context using size as the focal point. Once students understand the terminology, it can be used to both communicate and focus attention.

Student Experience 11b: Mammoth Hot Springs Microbe Wheel, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Mammoth Hot Springs Microbe Wheels.

Student Experience 12: Using The Ir Thermometer To Develop Answerable Questions, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Students learn about and use IR thermometers in the classroom or some place on the school grounds to develop answerable questions. After developing the questions, they perform brief investigations to answer their questions and share their findings with their classmates.

Student Experience 04: Mammoth Hot Springs Photo Points, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Photos taken over time from set photo points can help to increase understanding of terrace formation and concretely map the movement of microbial communities. Now, and in the future, researchers can use these high quality photos to help answer questions about things such as microbial mat migration, possible shifts in water flow, and formation of terracing through travertine precipitation/deposition. In the meantime, visitors and students will have access to these photos and can compare visible changes themselves.

Background 4: Student Experience Lesson - Systems Study, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

This lesson helps students observe, integrate and articulate their knowledge of a familiar earth system by considering how the different parts of the system interact to keep it in balance. Students first explore the word “system” and then apply the concept of systems to a familiar natural environment. Students will create a collage that is a representation of this system through discussion, further inquiry, and investigation.

Student Experience 08: Starrs Temperature Tools, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Students get a chance to use various temperature tools to explore the Celcius temperature scale. They also will explore the differences in the temperature tools and determine and share with the whole group which tools are appropriate for measuring temperature in different situations.

Background 3: Microbiological Communities In Mammoth Hot Springs, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Microbial Communities in Mammoth Hot Springs Background

Student Experience 07: What's In The Bag?, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

This is a "black box" activity. Students use their sense of hearing, touch, and smell to figure out what objects are contained in their paper bag.

Background 6: Student Experience Lesson - Facies Modeling Using Video, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Background for Student Experience Lesson: Facies Modeling Using Video

Student Experience 10: Grid Protocols, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Students will use specific protocols and equipment to systematically collect comprehensive data from a single location at a single point in time.

Student Experience 13: Student Driven Research, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

In groups of 4-5, students develop answerable quesitons about MHS, and design their investigations and data collection procedures. Next, they carry out their investigations in the field during the expedition, perform simple data analysis, and present their findings and challenges to authentic audiences both at E:Y! and back in their own communities.

Background 1: Mammoth Hot Springs Background, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Mammoth Hot Springs geologic background

Student Experience 06: Prolonged Observations, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Students participate in an exercise conducting a prolonged observation of a known object. Students will compare how their observations change as the observation time passes. This activity meant to teach the importance of careful, sustained observation as a "scientific tool".

Student Experience 09: Social Applications For Power Of Ten (P10), Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

In this lesson, students are asked to observe and record their observations of an object at a specific distance, either moving away from or toward at specific powers of ten intervals. Discussions of their observations may help students to see how detail changes with perspective, and how different jobs, including science, might require focus on different powers of ten.

Student Experience 05: The Candle, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Sometimes objects turn out to be something other than what we think we are observing. Learning to make careful observations provide the basis for students to engage in further observations of objects that are both familiar and unfamiliar. In this lesson, students make observations while the teacher manipulates an object that appears to be a candle. This leads to the exploration of the differences between observations and inferences.

Background 5: Student Experience Lesson - Labeling Facies, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

Background for Student Experience Lesson: Labeling Facies

Annotated Bibliography: Environmental Education (1998-2013), Erich Yahner

Erich Yahner

No abstract provided.

Depicting Estimates Using The Intercept In Meta-Regression Models: The Moving Constant Technique, Blair T. Johnson Dr., Tania B. Huedo-Medina Dr.

Blair T. Johnson

In any scientific discipline, the ability to portray research patterns graphically often aids greatly in interpreting a phenomenon. In part to depict phenomena, the statistics and capabilities of meta-analytic models have grown increasingly sophisticated. Accordingly, this article details how to move the constant in weighted meta-analysis regression models (viz. “meta-regression”) to illuminate the patterns in such models across a range of complexities. Although it is commonly ignored in practice, the constant (or intercept) in such models can be indispensible when it is not relegated to its usual static role. The moving constant technique makes possible estimates and confidence intervals at …

Enabling National Software Development Competitions To Identify And Enhance Student Mentor Capability In Singapore, Chris Boesch, Sandra Boesch

Chris BOESCH

The authors previously developed a system to facilitate the self-directed learning and practicing of software languages in Singapore. One of the goals of this self-directed learning was to enable the creation of student mentors who would be able to assist other students during classroom sessions. Building on this work, the authors extended the platform to support the promotion and coordination of multiple programming competitions including multiple schools systems within Singapore with the goals of identifying, enabling, and mentoring students who might be better prepared to mentor their peers at their school after participating in the country wide competition. This paper …

Automated Mentor Assignment In Blended Learning Environments, Chris Boesch, Kevin Steppe

Chris BOESCH

In this paper we discuss the addition of automatic assignment of mentors during inclass lab work to an existing online platform for programing practice. SingPath is an web based tool for users to practice programming in several software languages. The platform started as a tool to provide students with online feedback on solutions to programming problems and expanded over time to support different of blended learning needs for a variety of classes and classroom settings. The SingPath platform supports traditional self-directed learning mechanisms such as badges and completion metrics as well as features for use in classrooms, such as tournaments. …

Creating Adaptive Quests To Support Personalized Learning Experiences When Learning Software Languages, Chris Boesch, Sandra Boesch

Chris BOESCH

Over the past three years the authors have been developing and refining an online practicing platform called SingPath, which enables users to practice writing code in various software languages. The most recent feature to be released is a Quest mode that encourages users by showing short video clips each time a user solves five problems. In addition, users are able to choose whether to play through these quests on easy, medium, or hard levels of difficulty. The ability for users to customize their game play enables them to modify the difficulty of the experience and ideally self-regulate how frustrating or …

Tournament-Based Teaching, Shannon Christopher Boesch, Sandra Boesch

Chris BOESCH

Over the past two years we have collaborated to develop a process and set of online games to enable additional feedback to both students and instructors in a classroom setting. We have named the resulting process Tournament-based Teaching due to the extensive use of tournament-based feedback for groups and individuals throughout course delivery. Tournament-based Teaching enables individualized and peer-based learning in a classroom setting and provides additional motivation for students to prepare for classroom sessions. It also provides feedback to instructors, which can be leveraged to provide better schedule classroom sessions.

Adaptive Gameplay For Programming Practice, Chris Boesch, Sandra Boesch

Chris BOESCH

Over the past four years, we have collaborated to develop a set of online games to enable users to practice software languages in a self-directed manner and as part of a class. Recently we introduced a new adaptive difficulty feature that enables players to self-regulate the difficulty of the games they are playing to practice. These new features also provide additional information to further adapt the problem content to better meet the needs of the users.

Evolving An Information Systems Capstone Course To Align With The Fast Changing Singapore Marketplace, Chris Boesch, Benjamin Kok Siew Gan

Chris BOESCH

Every year, around fifty-five undergraduate teams of four to six students are required to complete a capstone course for the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. Each team spends approximately five months working with an industry sponsor using the latest tools and techniques. Students actively learn by implementing the system to solve a real world problem. In addition to delivering value to the local sponsor, our students learn specialized skills currently needed in the marketplace, which might not yet be incorporated into electives and core courses. In this paper, we discuss the tradeoffs of providing students and project …

Case Study On Using A Programming Practice Tool For Evaluating University Applicants, Shannon Christopher Boesch, Kevin Steppe

Chris BOESCH

We used a programming practice tool to test basic programming skills of prospective students. A live competition was used to test those skills. Students who did well were asked for further interviews. Most students had no prior background and reported learning the basics of two programming languages within two weeks of self-study.