Rachel E. Scherr

Founder, Scherr & Associates

Visiting Scholar

Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center

University of Washington

Seattle, WA

Research Assistant Professor

Physics Education Research Group

Department of Physics

University of Maryland

College Park, MD

rescherr@gmail.com

Curriculum vitae Publications Presentations

Current research interests

(last updated August 2009)

My main interest is in analyzing richly detailed (video) records of successful learning activities in order to better understand what is happening in them.  My history is in reforming university physics instruction; my current interests are in K-20 teacher professional development.

1.   Peer interactions:  Recognizing what the students in collaborative learning environments do to learn together.

• Example:  Observing the interaction of students’ behavior, the substance of their speech, and their epistemological framing – their sense of what is taking place at the moment with respect to knowledge.  For example, one cluster of behaviors, which includes animated speech, eye contact, and gesturing, frequently appears with reasoning that is original, personal, intellectually demanding, or emotionally intense; taken together, these verbal and nonverbal displays indicate to us and to the group itself a framing of the activity as discussing one another’s conceptual ideas. (Published)
• Example:  Exploring how students create and sustain conversation in which they engage with science concepts on their own terms.  We find that transitions into this type of conceptually productive conversation strongly involve the negotiation of social attention and acknowledgment.  (In progress)

2.   Teacher-student interactions:  Identifying and cultivating effective teacher practices in student-centered learning environments.

• Example: Producing a package of tutorials (small-group collaborative active-learning environments) and resources for implementation, designed to enable instructors to make effective adaptations for their local circumstances and prepare themselves and their TAs to teach.  The tutorials are research-based, open-source instructional materials designed to promote students’ reflection on their learning process as well as conceptual understanding of physics topics. The tutorials are embedded with comments from the developers, advice from experienced instructors, and video clips of students working on the materials, and are packaged together with instructor’s guides, pre- and post-tests, and so on.  (Published)
• Example: Helping physics graduate students become better TAs in tutorials, for which the first step is to identify what they understand their job to be and how they act in a tutorial classroom. Preliminary results indicate that the goal of designing an effective professional development program for this population is complicated by the fact that classroom, departmental, and institutional levels of implementation have the potential to strongly affect whether TAs buy into tutorials, and probably outweighs the influence of any particular activity or experience that we might prepare for them. (In progress)