Rachel E. Scherr
Research Assistant Professor
Physics Education Research Group
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
(301) 405-6179
Curriculum vitae Publications Presentations
Current research interests
(last updated November 2007)
1. Helping physics graduate students become better TAs in tutorials (small-group collaborative active-learning environments), for which the first step is to identify what they understand their job to be and how they act in a tutorial classroom.
• Detailed case studies using many data sources with physics graduate TAs at Maryland. Preliminary results: These TAs have well-articulated, high-commitment views of the nature of physics and physics learning that directly inform their teaching practices. Different TAs have dramatically different views and dramatically different tutorial practices to go with them. (Presented)
• A small quantitative study of who initiates interactions in tutorials. Answer: The TAs, overwhelmingly, much more than supervisors had realized. (Published)
2. Conceptualizing "progress in scientific thinking" in ways that go beyond right answers.
• Investigations of how students understand active-learning instructional environments. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for sensemaking or as an assignment to fill out a worksheet. The student’s understanding of the nature of the activity affects what she notices, what knowledge she accesses, and how she thinks to act. We find useful evidence of framing in easily observed features of students’ behavior. More broadly, we describe a dynamic among behavior, framing, and the conceptual substance of student reasoning. (In press)
• Development of a formal coding scheme for mechanistic reasoning, adapted from work done in the philosophy of science, and applied it to K-20 students with promising results for identifying a particular kind of quality scientific reasoning at all levels. (Published)
• Development of measures of "sensemaking" behavior based on demonstrations of intellectual independence, coherence, mechanistic reasoning, resourcefulness, and metacognition. Contrasting behaviors include rote and assessment-focused performances, which we call “answer-making” because of their focus on generating the correct problem solution. (Presented)
• We have preliminary but dramatic evidence that the above three things (mechanistic reasoning, sensemaking, and certain behavioral patterns) are strongly correlated. A behavioral indicator linking all of them appears to be gestures, about which there is an extensive body of research. (Published)
3. Developing open-source tutorials.
Production of a set of tutorials premised on the assumption that people inevitably need to adapt materials to suit their local circumstances. We distribute a set of research-based, open-source, epistemologically-focused mechanics tutorials, embedded with video clips of students working on the materials as well as comments from the developers, advice from experienced instructors, and so on. The hope is to give people the kind of information that enables them to make effective adaptations and prepare themselves and their TAs to teach.