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Intro

Our research focuses on introductory college-level physics labs. What do students learn? How can we help them learn better? And what does learning in the lab offer that learning in lecture does not? We have been developing labs that introduce students to the nature of scientific measurement while also developing a conceptual understanding of measurement and uncertainty, a procedural toolbox for handling and analyzing data, and critical thinking behaviours to reason about data scientifically. We are generally interested in how student epistemologies interact with their learning in the lab and how to foster more productive epistemologies and attitudes. In the future, we plan to examine how the pedagogy we have developed transfers to other disciplines, higher-level lab courses, and to undergraduate research experiences. We are also interested in gender and diversity issues in the lab, given that students spend a lot of their time in a lab working on computers and hands-on experiments.

News

Our first DBER collaboration publication!

We are thrilled to share that we have just published our first interdisciplinary discipline-based education research publication! Learn about how the biologists and physicists came together on the Bio-MAPS project:

Seeking applications for Cornell University Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship program

Cornell University is developing a strong discipline-based education research community, with faculty, postdocs, and students in biology, physics, economics, and more. DBER efforts also build on the University’s Active Learning Initiative, an institutional funding program to support faculty and departments to implement evidence-based teaching and learning. To continue to build this group, we are interested in supporting DBER applications for the Cornell University Presidential Postdoctoral Fellows program. Information about this program is below.