The AMS Short Course Atmospheric Science Education Research: A Beginner’s Guide will be held on 7 January 2018 preceding the 98th AMS Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas.
Unlike many other disciplines, the atmospheric science community has not incorporated the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) into our communities through discipline specific journals. Furthermore, there is a need for a centralized location (e.g., website) that would allow the atmospheric science community to share scholarly articles in SoTL, and to collaborate in order to answer research questions with participants from multiple locations and various demographics. At the 2016 Earth Educators Rendezvous in Madison, WI, a working group of atmospheric science educators and education researchers convened to share ideas for the creation of a discipline-based education research (DBER) community in atmospheric science.
The goal of this short course is to meet as a community to discuss the elements of education research design, and establish a DBER community for atmospheric science, transforming the way in which we approach teaching and learning in the field. This short course is aimed at faculty and graduate students interested in atmospheric science education research and practice, for both traditional and distance learning classrooms.
The course will be divided into two parts. During the first part of the course, participants will learn what determines teaching effectiveness, including elements of education research design and qualitative and quantitative methods for gathering evidence of learning. This will be accomplished through a brief lecture, followed by a group exercise and discussion. The second part of this course will consist of break-out groups (non-major, entry-level major, and upper-level major) that will have guided discussions to determine group-specific needs and develop potential research questions. Following the break-out sessions, we will reconvene for a larger group discussion to determine the next steps for establishing a DBER community for the atmospheric sciences.
The one-day course will be a mixture of lecture, break-out sessions and group discussion. At the conclusion of the short course, participants will be invited to become members of this growing community, and will work together to develop research questions that should be a high priority for the community to study, as well as establish ideas for teaching innovations that could be used to answer those questions.
The instructors for the course are:
Todd Ellis, Western Michigan University
Dawn Kopacz, University of Nebraska - Lincoln
Lindsay Maudlin, North Carolina State University
Wendilyn Flynn, University of Northern Colorado
All short course/workshop attendees must register and wear a badge/ribbon. Short course/workshop registration is not included in the 98th Annual Meeting registration, and short course/workshop registration does not include registration for the 98th AMS Annual Meeting.