CAREER: Embodied Responsive Teaching in Undergraduate Physics

About This Grant

In STEM education, students' learning outcomes are highly contingent on the quality of instruction they receive. Previous research has shown that responsive teaching – instructors' efforts to elicit, attend, and respond to the substance of students' ideas and to connect those ideas with the discipline – has profound impacts on students' STEM learning. Despite the well-established role that gesture and other nonverbal forms of communication play in how students convey their ideas about STEM phenomena, research on responsive teaching in undergraduate science courses has primarily been limited to communication processes that occur in speech. This project will investigate embodied responsive teaching in science by examining how physics instructors elicit, pay attention to, and respond to nonverbal aspects of students' ideas and how these instructor-student interactions impact students' physics learning. Based on these investigations, professional development materials will be developed to educate STEM instructors on how to more effectively leverage students' use of gesture and nonverbal communication in the classroom to support their learning. By better understanding the role nonverbal communication plays in instructor-student interactions in undergraduate STEM courses, this CAREER project will contribute to more effective STEM education and STEM educator development. Drawing on an existing video corpus of instructor-guided collaborative learning activities in an undergraduate physics course, this project will use multimodal conversation analysis and the Co-Operative Action framework to investigate four research questions that focus on instructor-student interactions during discussion and laboratory sessions. The research questions include: (1) How do students use embodied communicational resources to make sense of and communicate ideas about energy in thermodynamics and mechanics in small-group and whole-class discussions? (2) How do instructors use embodied responsive teaching (ERT) to elicit, attend to, and respond to students' ideas conveyed through gesture and other embodied communicational resources? (3) How do embodied responsive teaching moves support or constrain opportunities for engagement in scientific practices? (4) How do embodied responsive teaching moves support or constrain changes in students' conceptual understanding? The project's education plan will apply the research findings to develop video-based professional development modules for pre-service secondary STEM teachers and physics teaching assistants at the University of Buffalo, SUNY. The modules will be iteratively refined and disseminated widely through the Periscope web-based platform. This project is expected to contribute to the improvement of undergraduate physics education by generating an enhanced understanding of the instructional practices that support students' learning and participation. In addition, it will develop the first widely available video-based professional development lessons to strengthen STEM educators' understanding of representational gesture in students’ scientific sensemaking. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program is a National Science Foundation (NSF)-wide activity that supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education. This CAREER project is supported by NSF STEM Education Directorate’s Core Research (ECR) program. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.