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Register a new userResearch and Education in Basic Space Science: The Approach Pursued in the UN/ESA Workshops
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H.M.K. Al-Naimiy
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Since 1990, the United Nations in cooperation with the European Space Agency is holding annually a workshop on basic space science for the benefit of the worldwide development of astronomy. These workshops have been held in countries of Asia and the Pacific (India, Sri Lanka), Latin America and the Caribbean (Costa Rica, Colombia, Honduras), Africa (Nigeria), Western Asia (Egypt, Jordan), and Europe (Germany, France). Additional to the scientific benefits of the workshops and the strengthening of international cooperation, the workshops lead to the establishment of astronomical telescope facilities in Colombia, Egypt, Honduras, Jordan, Morocco, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Uruguay. The annual UN/ESA Workshops continue to pursue an agenda to network these astronomical telescope facilities through similar research and education programmes. Teaching material and hands-on astrophysics material has been developed for the operation of such astronomical telescope facilities in an university environment.
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Background: Qualitative interviewing is a common tool that has been utilized by Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education researchers to explore and describe the experiences of students, educators, or other educational stakeholders. Some interviewing techniques use co-creation of an artifact, such as a personal timeline, as a unique way to elicit a detailed narrative from a respondent. The purpose of this commentary is to describe an interview artifact called a life grid. First used and validated in medical sociology to conduct life course research, we adapted the life grid for use in research on undergraduate STEM education. We applied the life grid interview technique to two contexts: 1) students in an advance degree program reflecting on their entire undergraduate career as a biology major, and 2) students in an undergraduate physics program reflecting on a multi-week lab project. Results: We found that the life grid supported four important attributes of an interview: facilitation of the respondents agency, establishment of rapport between interviewers and respondents, enhanced depth of the respondents narratives, and the construction of more accurate accounts of events. We situate our experiences with respect to those attributes and compare them with the experiences detailed in literature. Conclusions: We conclude with recommendations for future use of the life grid technique in undergraduate STEM education research. Overall, we find the life grid to be a valuable tool to use when conducting interviews about phenomena with a chronological component.
The NSFs Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship (AAPF) is exceptional among the available postdoctoral awards in Astronomy and Astrophysics. The fellowship is one of the few that allows postdoctoral researchers to pursue an original research program, of their own design, at the U.S. institution of their choice. However, what makes this fellowship truly unique is the ability of Fellows to lead an equally challenging, original educational program simultaneously. The legacy of this singular fellowship has been to encourage and advance leaders in the field who are equally as passionate about their own research as they are about sharing that research and their passion for astronomy with students and the public. In this positional paper we address the importance of fellowships like the AAPF to the astronomical profession by identifying the science and educational contributions that Fellows have made to the community. Further, we recommend that fellowships that encourage leading postdoctoral researchers to also become leaders in Astronomy education be continued and expanded.
The traditional university science curriculum was designed to train specialists in specific disciplines. However, in universities all over the world, science students are going into increasingly diverse careers and the current model does not fit their needs. Advances in technology also make certain modes of learning obsolete. In the last 10 years, the Faculty of Science of the University of Hong Kong has undertaken major curriculum reforms. A sequence of science foundation courses required of all incoming science students are designed to teach science in an integrated manner, and to emphasize the concepts and utilities, not computational techniques, of mathematics. A number of non-discipline specific common core courses have been developed to broaden students awareness of the relevance of science to society and the interdisciplinary nature of science. By putting the emphasis on the scientific process rather than the outcome, students are taught how to identify, formulate, and solve diverse problems.
The International Particle Physics Outreach Group (IPPOG) has been making concerted and systematic efforts to present and popularise particle physics across all audiences and age groups since 1997. Today the scientific community has in IPPOG a strategic pillar in fostering long-term, sustainable support for fundamental research around the world. One of the main tools IPPOG has been offering to the scientific community, teachers and educators for almost 10 years is the Resource Database (RDB), an online platform containing a collection of high quality engaging education and outreach materials in particle physics and related sciences.
The authors use an action research (AR) approach in a collegiate studio physics class to investigate the power of partnerships via conferences as they relate to issues of establishing a student/mentor rapport, empowering students to reduce inequity, and the successes and barriers to hearing students voices. The graduate teaching assistant (TA, Author 1) conducted one-on-one conferences with 29 students, elicited student opinions about the progress of the course, and talked with faculty, TAs, and an undergraduate supplemental instructor for other sections of the course. At the end of the semester, the students reported increased knowledge of the TA as a person and as an instructor, and vice versa. Sixty-five percent of students reported no interest in changing circumstances to make it easier to talk about personal concerns with the TA. College students reluctantly voiced their opinions about the course, possibly due to the power structure of the classroom. Other TAs in the department expressed mostly disinterest in the project, while faculty members were interested in student learning but skeptical of student empowerment. A case study of one student is presented, wherein his attendance improved in the course and he received additional help outside class, both possibly as a result of the student/TA conferences. Students in this studio physics section were more likely to interact directly with faculty or TAs during lectures, but less likely to do so during lab sessions, than were students in a non-studio physics section.
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