Future Teachers (undergraduate students)

CSUN helps educate more teachers than any other public school in the state of California.

Integrated science content and science methods courses. The faculty in research science and the College of Education collaborate closely to create an integrated and complementary curriculum. You would think that faculty teaching science methods and science content courses would talk often, but the reality is that it doesn’t happen often enough at most schools.

A coherent science content program. I coordinate the curriculum of 3 of the 4 courses taken by elementary pre-service teachers (liberal studies majors). I work closely with the coordinator of the life science courses.

Noyce Scholars program for science majors interested in teaching. I help administer the Noyce Scholars program on campus. We offer stipends to science majors as they work on their teaching credential to help attract knowledgeable and enthusiastic new teachers.

Possible Senior Thesis Projects for Undergraduate geology students

Map scale in 101 classes. How is map scale taught at the introductory level? Are there ways we can improve it using more hands-on mini-excursions using campus aerial photos?

How can we best integrate deaf students in team based college science classes? CSUN hosts a very large population of deaf students, many of whom take classes in our department. In some of our classes, we have been experimenting with team-based learning where groups of students work to solve problems. When deaf students are part of the team, the dynamics must change. This thesis project will explore how to structure the team-based class so that it is most accessible to deaf students.

How does physical layout of a classroom affect team interaction? We recently remodeled two of the classrooms in our department with the specific goal of improving student interaction and peer instruction. We employed two different table layouts. Which works better? How do these new layouts compare to existing classroom spaces?

Reading in science at the elementary school level. Preservice teachers in our departments teach using FOSS kits that include hands-on activities along with targeted reading assignments. What is the most effective way to integrate reading assignments into an elementary science classroom. This question is particularly important given the current emphasis on reading scores at the expense of classroom time for science. In some districts, science can only survive if it also supports other educational goals.

How do you read a scientific paper? Most graduate school programs require organized paper-reading seminars, and some even have classes designed to teach scientific literature reading strategies. However, most faculty have never thought explicitly about the way they absorb information from these articles. This project will work with a few CSUN graduate level classes that teach literature reading to compare how expert faculty read papers compared with how novice students read papers.

Possible Masters Thesis Projects for Graduate students

Topics in Urban geoscience education A large focus of my research is on how to introduce earth science (and other natural sciences) to urban students. Specific topics include:

1. •How can field trips be run effectively for urban students?
   

2. •Schoolyard analogies to earth processes
   

3. •Using Ground Penetrating Radar to demonstrate earth science in an urban setting
   

Computer Supported Collaborative Science. I work with a team of faculty from the sciences and the College of Education on an innovative professional development program. We are helping teachers use existing technology to teach science in a more collaborative manner. Students record data side-by-side with one another using cloud computing resources like Google Docs. We are hoping to refine the pedagogy and verify its positive impact on student learning.

Tracking long-term trends in pre-service teacher attitudes at CSUN. Faculty at CSUN have been administering an attitude survey at the beginning and end of their program to liberal studies majors for nearly a decade. How do their attitudes change? What teaching methods and which classes have the strongest impact on their attitude?

Peer assessment of microteaching by preservice teachers. Our geology classes employ a technique called microteaching where teachers deliver lessons to small groups of their peers. Because the course instructor cannot watch all the microteachers teach their entire lesson, we rely on peer feedback. The quality of feedback varies from group to group and class to class. What factors promote useful, fair, supportive feedback? And what exactly does that feedback look like?

“The Chemistry Effect.” The PHSC 170 class at CSUN covers all topics in physics and chemistry in a single semester. Despite the fact that we spend more time on physics concepts, performance is always higher on the chemistry section despite fairly equal scores on pretests in the two topics. Why is it that students learn the chemistry faster? Most likely because they have already taken it. More than 75% of the students took chemistry in late high school or early college, while less than a quarter took physics at any point in high school or college. So teaching chemistry means re-teaching them while teaching physics means exposing them to the material for the first time. Why do they forget so much of the chemistry? Why is the reteaching so effective, even when students appear to be equally knowledge-less on both topics when they start out?

Where are you in life? I’ve organized this page for different types of students who want to know if they might fit into our program at CSUN.