arXiv subjects

Daniel L. Reinholz

Publications and source records attributed to Daniel L. Reinholz.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2017

Personalized instructor responses to guided student reflections: Analysis of two instructors' perspectives and practices

One way to foster a supportive culture in physics departments is for instructors to provide students with personal attention regarding their academic difficulties. To this end, we have developed the Guided Reflection Form (GRF), an online tool that facilitates student reflections and personalized instructor responses. In the present work, we report on the experiences and practices of two instructors who used the GRF in an introductory physics lab course. Our analysis draws on two sources of data: (i) post-semester interviews with both instructors and (ii) the instructors' written responses to 134 student reflections. Interviews focused on the instructors' perceptions about the goals and framing of the GRF activity, and characteristics of good or bad feedback. Their GRF responses were analyzed for the presence of up to six types of statement: encouraging statements, normalizing statements, empathizing statements, strategy suggestions, resource suggestions, and feedback to the student on the structure of their reflection. We find that both instructors used all six response types, in alignment with their perceptions of what counts as good feedback. This exploratory qualitative investigation demonstrates that the GRF can serve as a mechanism for instructors to pay personal attention to their students. In addition, it opens the door to future work about the impact of the GRF on student-teacher interactions.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2017

Attending to experimental physics practices and lifelong learning skills in an introductory laboratory course

We have designed an introductory laboratory course that engaged first-year undergraduate students in two complementary types of iteration: (1) iterative improvement of experiments through cycles of modeling systems, designing experiments, analyzing data, and refining models and designs; and (2) iterative improvement of self through cycles of reflecting on progress, soliciting feedback, and implementing changes to study habits and habits of mind. The course consisted of three major activities: a thermal expansion activity, which spanned the first half of the semester; final research projects, which spanned the second half of the semester; and guided student reflections, which took place throughout the duration of the course. We describe our curricular designs and report examples of student work that demonstrate students' iterative improvements in multiple contexts.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2017

Learning to do diversity work: A model for continued education of program organizers

Physics and physics education in the United States suffer from severe (and, in some cases, worsening) underrepresentation of Black, Latina/o, and Native people of all genders and women of all races and ethnicities. This underrepresentation is a symptom with multiple causes and myriad potential solutions. In this paper, we describe an approach to addressing the causes of underrepresentation through physics students' collective and continued education about racism, sexism, other dimensions of marginalization, as well as models of allyship and social change. Specifically, we focus on the efforts of undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdocs who are members of a student-run diversity-oriented organization in a physics department at a large, selective, predominantly white university with high research activity. This group's education was accomplished through quarterly Diversity Workshops. Here we report on six Diversity Workshops that were co-designed and facilitated by the authors. We describe the context, motivation, and goals of the workshops, the theories underlying their design and implementation, and their content. In addition, we discuss workshop attendance and suggest strategies for maintaining high attendance in the future. Because the details of our workshops were tailored to the specific needs and interests of a particular student organization, our workshop agendas may not be widely applicable beyond our local context. Therefore, we share our model, design principles, and facilitation strategies in this paper.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2016

Using Peer Feedback to Promote Reflection on Open-Ended Problems

This paper describes a new approach for learning from homework, called Peer-Assisted Reflection (PAR). PAR involves students using peer feedback to improve their work on open-ended homework problems. Collaborating with peers and revising one's work based on the feedback of others are important aspects of doing and learning physics. While notable exceptions exist, homework and exams are generally individual activities that do not support collaboration and refinement, which misses important opportunities to use assessment for learning. In contrast, PAR provides students with a structure to iteratively engage with challenging, open-ended problems and solicit the input of their peers to improve their work.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2015

Towards a Model of Systemic Change in University STEM Education

Despite numerous calls for the transformation of undergraduate STEM education, there is still a lack of successful models for creating large-scale, systemic cultural changes in STEM departments. To date, change efforts have generally focused on one of three areas: developing reflective teachers, disseminating curricula and pedagogy, or enacting institutional policy. These efforts illustrate many of the challenges of departmental change; in particular, they highlight the need for a holistic approach that integrates across all three of these levels: individual faculty, whole departments, and university policymakers. To address these challenges, as part of our campus-wide AAU-sponsored effort in STEM education transformation, we import and integrate models of change from multiple perspectives. We draw from models in organizational change, from departmental and disciplinary change in STEM education, and from efforts to support individual efforts such as the development and dissemination model. As a result, our departmental cultural change efforts are an attempt at holistic reform. We will discuss our theoretical underpinnings and ground this theory in a sample of approaches in two departments.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2015

A Framework for Transforming Departmental Culture to Support Educational Innovation

This paper provides a research-based framework for promoting institutional change in higher education. To date, most educational change efforts have focused on relatively narrow subsets of the university system (e.g., faculty teaching practices or administrative policies) and have been largely driven by implicit change logics; both of these features have limited the success of such efforts at achieving sustained, systemic change. Drawing from the literature on organizational and cultural change, our framework encourages change agents to coordinate their activities across three key levels of the university and to ground their activities in the various change perspectives that emerge from that literature. We use examples from a change project that we have been carrying out at a large research university to illustrate how our framework can be used as a basis for planning and implementing holistic change.

physics.ed-ph↗

arXiv2015

Attending to lifelong learning skills through guided reflection in a physics class

This paper describes a tool, the Guided Reflection Form (GRF), which was used to promote reflection in a modeling-based physics course. Each week, students completed a guided reflection and received feedback from their instructors. These activities were intended to help students become better at the process of reflection, developing skills that they could apply in their future learning. We analyzed student reflections: (1) to provide insight into the reflection process itself and (2) to describe common themes in student reflections. Most students were able to use the GRF to reflect on their learning in meaningful ways. Moreover, the themes present in student reflections provide insights into struggles commonly faced by physics students. We discuss the design of the GRF in detail, so that others may use it as a tool to support student reflections.

physics.ed-ph↗