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Register a new userAstroDance: Engaging Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Students in Astrophysics via Multimedia Performances
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The dynamics of gravitating astrophysical systems such as black holes and neutron stars are fascinatingly complex, offer some of natures most spectacular phenomena, and capture the publics imagination in ways that few subjects can. Here, we describe {it AstroDance}, a multi-media project to engage deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students in astronomy and gravitational physics. {it AstroDance} incorporates multiple means of representation of scientific concepts and was performed primarily for secondary and post-secondary audiences at $sim$20 venues in the northeastern US prior to the historic first detection of gravitational waves. As part of the {it AstroDance} project, we surveyed $sim$1000 audience members roughly split evenly between hearing and DHH audience members. While both groups reported statistically equivalent high-rates of enjoyment of the performance, the DHH group reported an increase in how much they learned about science at a statistically significant rate compared to the hearing audience. Our findings suggest that multi-sensory approaches benefit both hearing and deaf audiences and enable accessible participation for broader groups.
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Human perception of surrounding events is strongly dependent on audio cues. Thus, acoustic insulation can seriously impact situational awareness. We present an exploratory study in the domain of assistive computing, eliciting requirements and presenting solutions to problems found in the development of an environmental sound recognition system, which aims to assist deaf and hard of hearing people in the perception of sounds. To take advantage of smartphones computational ubiquity, we propose a system that executes all processing on the device itself, from audio features extraction to recognition and visual presentation of results. Our application also presents the confidence level of the classification to the user. A test of the system conducted with deaf users provided important and inspiring feedback from participants.
With the adoption of instructional laboratories (labs) that require students to make their own decisions, there is a need to better understand students activities as they make sense of their data and decide how to proceed. In particular, understanding when students do not engage productively with unexpected data may provide insights into how to better support students in more open-ended labs. We examine video and audio data from groups within a lab session where students were expected to find data inconsistent with the predictions of two models. In prior work, we examined the actions of the four groups that productively grapple with this designed problem. Here, we analyze the engagement of the three groups that do not. We conducted three phases of analysis: 1) documenting large scale behaviors and time spent in on-topic discussion, 2) analyzing interactions with the teaching assistant, and 3) identifying students framing--their expectations for what is taking place--when they were discussing their data. Our Phase 1 and 2 analysis show only minor differences between the groups that engaged with the problem and those that did not. Our Phase 3 analysis demonstrated that the groups that did not engage with the problem framed the lab activity as about confirming a known result or as a series of hoops to jump through to fulfill assignment requirements. Implications for instruction include supporting teaching assistants to attend to students framing and agency within laboratory classrooms.
This paper reports on an investigation into the correlations between students understandings of introductory astronomy concepts and the correctness and coherency of their written responses to targeted Lecture-Tutorial questions. We assessed the correctness and coherency of responses from 454 college-level, general education, introductory astronomy students enrolled in courses taught in the spring of 2010, 2011, and 2012. We hypothesized that students who consistently provided responses with high levels of correctness and coherency would outperform students who did not on multiple measures of astronomy content knowledge. We compared students correctness and coherency scores to their normalized gains on the Light and Spectroscopy Concept Inventory (LSCI) and to their scores on closely-related exam items. Our analysis revealed that no significant correlations exist between students correctness and coherency scores and their LSCI gain scores or exam item scores. However, the participant group in our study did achieve high scores on the LSCI and on closely-related exam items. We hypothesized that these differences are due to the discussions that take place between students which suggests that instructors who teach with active engagement instructional strategies should focus their implementation on ensuring that their students fully engage in the richest possible discourse.
We describe a study of period changes in 59 RR Lyrae stars, using times of maximum brightness from the GEOS database. The work was carried out by outstanding senior high school students in the University of Toronto Mentorship Program. This paper is written in such a way that high school or undergraduate physics and astronomy students could use it as a guide and template for carrying out original research, by studying period changes in these and other types of variable stars.
The detection and study of extrasolar planets is an exciting and thriving field in modern astrophysics, and an increasingly popular topic in introductory astronomy courses. One detection method relies on searching for stars whose light has been gravitationally microlensed by an extrasolar planet. In order to facilitate instructors abilities to bring this interesting mix of general relativity and extrasolar planet detection into the introductory astronomy classroom, we have developed a new Lecture-Tutorial, Detecting Exoplanets with Gravitational Microlensing. In this paper, we describe how this new Lecture-Tutorials representations of astrophysical phenomena, which we selected and created based on theoretically motivated considerations of their pedagogical affordances, are used to help introductory astronomy students develop more expert-like reasoning abilities.
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