Alistair M
- Research Program Mentor
PhD candidate at North Dakota University System
Expertise
Physics, Physics Education Research, Science of Learning
Bio
My research has covered a range of topics in education (specifically in college physics) from student metacognition (thinking about thinking) to Group Exams to Professional development for University Faculty. My passion and goal is improve the educational experience of students in STEM classes by understanding how students think and learn, working to restructure traditional college classrooms and curriculums, and rekindling students' passion as learners and connecting the contents of my classroom with students to make learning fun and meaningful. My primary hobby is gaming: card games, board games, and video games. I primarily play Magic The Gathering but I love to learn new board games. My interest is in board game design, I am currently working on developing and eventually selling a card game, with a board game in the works.Project ideas
Student Engagement in My School
There are a variety of methods for assessing instruction and student learning and a variety of approaches. If you are interested in understanding how different classes are taught, you could learn the COPUS observation protocol, which you could use to create a somewhat quantitative representation of your classes. If you are interested in student engagement we could distribute the CLASS, as survey designed to measure students' perceptions of their learning. A combination of the COPUS and the CLASS would let you make claims about how specific instructional strategies affect students' interest in learning. On a more qualitative level, we could create our own survey or even an "interview protocol" to investigate specific issues that are interesting to you. For example I am particularly interested in keeping students engaged, and if a teacher at your school consistently has excited engaged students we could iteratively interview students to investigate common trends in their experiences and report on what that teacher does. There are a lot of ways to go about investigating learning and teaching- in the end they boil down to your interests, but each project would involve determining a goal using your interest, creating a plan to collect data, and then writing a report that explains our findings with evidence.