UMass Amherst has a new website that launched this week and Brokk Toggerson is featured in a video on the introductory page for academics https://www.umass.edu/gateway/academics/undergraduate-programs.
Blog
Toggerson Presenting at Perusall Exchange 2021
Starting May 17th, Brokk Toggerson will have a presentation on the 2021 Perusall Exchange about the use of Perusall in a Graduate Student TA-training & Professional Development Course.
Abstract: Graduate students face several important transitions: becoming a researcher, a teacher, and a colleague. These transitions require specific skills: reading research, giving presentations, and navigating issues of diversity in the workplace. At UMass-Amherst incoming physics Ph.D. students begin developing these skills in a dedicated seminar through the lens of TA training. Students read journal articles about physics education in Perusall: simultaneously honing students’ ability to read research articles and introducing them to teaching best-practices.
Check it out!
Lab groups and peer evaluations
This past year, I have been working to develop a series of labs that focus on scientific skills, as opposed to teaching physics content. These changes are motivated in part by the pandemic: I want to have authentic laboratory experiences that students can complete at home with limited resources. However, these reforms are also motivated by the literature which suggests that lab is better suited to the teaching of such skills as opposed to content:
- Holmes, Natasha G., and Carl E. Wieman. “Introductory Physics Labs: We Can Do Better.” Physics Today 71, no. 1 (January 1, 2018): 38–45. https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3816.
- MacIsaac, Dan. “Report: AAPT Recommendations for the Undergraduate Physics Laboratory Curriculum.” The Physics Teacher 53, no. 4 (April 1, 2015): 253–253. https://doi.org/10.1119/1.4914580.
Lab groups are one of the necessities of such a large class. In order to respect the TA’s time and keep the grading load manageable, students must turn in reports as groups. Fortunately, I also think that learning to work in a scientific team is also an important goal of the lab experience.
This past semester, I have been trying to use Moodle to manage the lab groups and CATME to do peer evaluations. However, this has yielded two problems:
- The TAs must keep the lists in Moodle up to date and there is an unclear chain of command with regards to group management. Also, this requires a rather sophisticated understanding of Moodle and makes changing/managing groups difficult.
- The CATME protocol, while fantastic, is, I think, insufficiently transparent. Moreover, I must manage it. This is, frankly, too much load for me. I need a system that the TAs can successfully manage on their own.
I really like the multiplicative nature of the CATME results. A plan with which I am currently toying involves:
- Have a number of points equal to the number of members in the team.
- Each team member would distribute these points to their team members. Perhaps this would be done for a few different categories.
- There would also be one optional point that could be given to someone who really deserves an extra boost. This would be a bonus: if everyone in the team neglects to do it, they will still all get ones (i.e. their score would be equal to their actual grade).
- The result would be scaled in such a way that the final multipliers are between 0.7 or so and 1.05.
Obviously, this needs to be flushed out, but there are some key points for improvement here.
Brokk Toggerson featured in the Center for Teaching and Learning Faculty Successes page
Brokk Toggerson’s end-of-semester activities for Physics 132 were profiled in the Center for Teaching and Learning Faculty Successes page. What are some ways to conclude your semester and leave students with a lasting and positive impression? As the end of the semester is approaching, plan some meaningful activities to use during your last class session(s) to wrap up the semester strong. Often students struggle to remember even the most important course content that they learned throughout the semester.
Check it out!
Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills
Feldon, David F., James Peugh, Briana E. Timmerman, Michelle A. Maher, Melissa Hurst, Denise Strickland, Joanna A. Gilmore, and Cindy Stiegelmeyer. “Graduate Students’ Teaching Experiences Improve Their Methodological Research Skills.” Science 333, no. 6045 (2011): 1037–39.
I was meeting with Colleen Kuusinen, a new member of our Center for Teaching and Learning on a new project I am pursing as an Honors Thesis mentor. During our conversation, she mentioned this paper from 2011 which indicates that teaching experiences are beneficial to developing graduate students’ research skills. In this paper 95 graduate students’ research proposals were graded in accordance with a peer-reviewed “‘universal’ rubric for assessing undergraduates’ scientific reasoning skills using scientific writing” from B. Timmerman et al., Assess. Eval. High. Educ. 36, 509 (2011). The results were quite impressive as shown in the figures below. I think that these results only further the importance of developing good TA training.
