SED 600
Dean Papadakis
May 8, 2007
Conference Attendance Paper
The conference that I attended was held at the University of Southern
California on April 14, 2007. It was sponsored by, “The American
Association of Physics Teachers (Southern California Section)”. The
following website will show the program for that day including all of the
invited guest speakers.
http://www.csupomona.edu/~scaapt/
The audience was a mixture of high school physics teachers and several
university professors. There were many interesting talks, which were aimed
at improving physics education at both the high school and university level.
However, these talks were directed at very specific topics in physics, rather
than just how to improve teaching physics in general, and so it is a challenge
to examine the information with reference to my specific action research
topic in my masters program. What I will do is to examine two of the
speakers, whose talks were interesting to me.
Summary of Talks:
First, was the talk by U.S.C. professor Werner Dappen, who spoke on, “The
Role of Physics in Astronomy”. He has written (or been a co-author of) over
60 research papers. He is a theorist and his research focuses on the sun and
how it behaves as a plasma.
The most outstanding aspect of his talk was not the content, but his
presentation style. He was educated in Switzerland and has a very strong
accent, which makes it a challenge to understand him. His talk would
probably not be that interesting to the common person on the street, but he
had a very engaging style. He did not step behind the podium, but moved
close to the front row of the audience. He kept walking from the left side to
the right side of the group and had eye contact with many people in the
audience. He smiled frequently and while he was showing the slides of his
presentation, asked questions about the slides that made me what to listen.
In contrast, the first speaker spoke on a topic that sounded interesting to me
on paper (“4.6 Mile Scaled Solar System Model”), but he was very dry and
boring and I got nothing out of his talk. Dr. Dappen had me listening the
entire time and I really enjoyed how he kept the audience engaged. I
suppose that one connection I could make to my masters thesis is that if I
were to make a presentation of my topic to a group, no matter how
interesting my topic might be, I could completely ruin the presentation by
my style, if I don’t express my excitement for the topic. It is therefore
important to keep in mind, that I need to be excited about my topic and try to
keep eye contact with my audience, if I want people (including my students),
to also be excited about what I am teaching or presenting. Now discussing
the content of his talk, he began with a brief history of astronomy, by
pointing out how Aristarchus of Samos (the island in Greece neighboring the
island where my father was born) was able to determine the distance to the
Sun, back in 330 BC. Even though his answer was off by a factor of 40, it
was his method that was the intriguing part, according to Dr. Dappen. So
what I really benefited from most, was just hearing him speak and seeing his
engaging style.
The second speaker spoke on an interesting topic, but was not as engaging as
Dr. Dappen. It was “Teaching Professionalism to Undergraduates”. Dr.
William DeGraffenreid, from Sacramento State University, discussed a
course that he teaches, which examines examples from science history,
where scientists doing research have been dishonest in their research
practices. This can occur in their data collection or in their presentation of
the data or in the conclusions they reach based on their data. He gave us a
scenario of a research situation and asked us to discuss what we thought was
dishonest or deceptive in this research. It was a much more lively debate
that he was able to bring from the audience, which helped to make this an
interesting presentation. Here, the benefit that I think I can take from his
talk and bring to my own research question, is that I need to be sure that I
don’t make any conclusions from my research, that I can’t substantiate from
the data that I collect. This is where having triangulation is helpful. That is
to say that having data obtained in at least three different ways, will, help to
give credence to what conclusions I may draw from my data. This will all
start by having a clear picture of what methodology tools I plan to use. This
is a very important point that I believe helped me in my action research
proposal.