Projects

Ongoing

Embracing the future: the use of ChatGPT in Science Teacher Education
Our context is the master (and minor) in science education, a.k.a. STEM1 teacher education. The student population consists of STEM people, who generally find it difficult to reflect on their learning as a teacher. Lately we found students had asked ChatGPT to write their reflection on teacher personal identity for them. Although this might be considered as fraud, it was also a smart thing to do and their question to ChatGPT also incorporated their reflection; it was the wordy writing part they left to the AI. This is just one example on how an AI can be both desirable and undesirable in STEM teacher education.

The versatile use of ChatGPT may have benefits in and for education (Trust, Whalen & Mouza 2023), but it comes with inherent drawbacks such as plagiarism since it is quite good at passing for instance engineering courses’ assessments (Nicolic et al., 2023). This has caused the TU/e general examination committee to mark the use of ChatGPT specifically in exams as fraud.

Research so far has focused on seeing what the AI is capable of in terms of teaching, explaining physics or mathematics (Gregorcic & Pendrill, 2023; Kock, Salinas-Hernández, & Pepin, 2023) or writing papers (e.g. Kortemeyer, 2023; ACS, 2023). Initiatives have been taken on how to use a generative AI in writing academic papers including the proper way to reference to the use of it (ACS, 2023).

There are however also initiatives at TU/e and other universities to use ChatGPT in assign-ments and education rather than ban it outright (SURF, 2023). So far there has not been a study into the use ChatGPT in university science teacher education, although it has been advised to look into possibilities and to come to terms both in policy and practice on how the AI can be incorporated in teacher education and teaching (Trust, Whalen & Mouza, 2023). In this study we want to explore how ChatGPT could be used in university STEM teacher education within the 4TU teacher education institutes to come to balanced and well-considered suggestions for curriculum redesign in 4TU STEM teacher education courses and policy. Due to the nature of the master program, future high school science teachers practice will be innovated as a spin-off effect.

Education fellowship: The road to scientific inquiry “Transforming lab courses
I aim to improve lab course quality and stimulate collaboration among introductory lab courses, jointly redesigning materials. After successfully redesigning the first-year physics lab course with a focus on inquiry and the minor introducing students to physics experimentation, I shared my research through scientific papers and conferences. My primary research goal is to enable secondary school and first-year university students to engage in scientific inquiry.

The awareness of limited learning outcomes in content-focused lab courses globally has shifted the emphasis towards scientific inquiry in introductory labs. Transforming or developing lab courses is ambitious, as teachers often excel in experimentation but lack pedagogical knowledge for efficient redesign while managing teaching commitments. I propose a collaborative approach to share teaching materials and establish common goals for inquiry-based learning. Open-ended experiments and cross-cutting concepts foster applicability across science subjects. This effort promotes collaboration, enhances lab course quality, and addresses challenges faced by educators.

Showing Physics
Showing Physics (Dutch: ShowdeFysica) is a series of books for secondary physics education, written by a team of experts (physics teachers and physics teacher educators) on physics demonstration experiments. For the first book I was one of the testers of the testers. For the second I was part of the writers team. We are now in the process of developing the third book. Meanwhile we are in the process of translating the best demonstrations and publishing these in an open book. See the first chapters here.

Opening up Classroom Demonstration Experiments
Classroom demonstration experiments (demos) are often key elements in theoretical lectures as these make the concepts at hand more tangible. However, teachers are not always aware of the available demos that fit their needs, or know/understand the most effective way to use them. Moreover, the materials are not always available, affordable or accessible. To enable all teachers to make use of this effective teaching method, we will develop an open access repository where the demos are described in such detail (including pictures, recordings, list of materials, theoretical background, didactical approach, coding for data analysis), that these can ‘replace’ the live demos. Note! Replacing live demos is not our aim, it merely highlights the quality and level of detail we pursue. The ultimate goal is collaboratively compile an open and dynamic archive, enhance the quality of the demos in an iterative process by allowing collaborators to edit the materials, and expand the archive by uploading their materials. This way the materials become available and relevant to many faculties of our university and other educational institutes. See a teaser here

Finished

PhD. Thesis: Development of a teaching-learning sequence on scientific inquiry through argumentation for secondary education
Enabling students to engage in independent scientific inquiry is a highly valued but seemingly elusive goal of (secondary school) science education. Therefore, this study aims to determine and understand how to effectively develop inquiry knowledge in students. The chosen approach to enable students to plan, carry out and evaluate a physics inquiry, is to regard an inquiry as the construction of a scientifically cogent argument for a specific claim. In an authentic scientific inquiry, the researcher invests - from the very start of the inquiry - time and effort in making the inquiry’s claim as indisputable as possible. The researcher strives for optimal cogency of the argument in support of that claim. Throughout the various studies in this thesis it is argued that this idea can be translated to classroom situations: fostering the insight that students’ inquiry should result in a complete, correct and substantiated answer to the research question. It is shown that this is a meaningful strategy in enabling them to engage in independent scientific inquiry: it results in a cognitive need in students to develop the knowledge that allows them to produce such an answer. As such, this thesis shows that argumentation is an indispensable part of teaching scientific inquiry. Explicit attention for argumentation promotes development of students’ inquiry knowledge.

Erasmus+: Spoon, STEM Education and Practices are Not Only About the CONtENT
In both the scientific literature and educational institutions, education is often evaluated in terms of learning outcomes, mainly interpreted as an increase in knowledge of content. In STEM education, the effectiveness of the teaching process is then judged in terms of the learning outcome of the content.

Within this consortium, we believe that the emphasis on knowledge transfer on content, while very important, should not be the only variable to consider. So we asked ourselves: What are the innate values of teaching process apart from the transfer of knowledge? And how can these sometimes elusive factors be quantitative and measurable?

We hypothesize that how knowledge is acquired and transferred can have a major impact on students. We refer, for example, to the inquiry process in science, instilling in students the true spirit of discovery: hypothesis, observation, experimentation, failure, success and critical thinking. But we also consider group processes and emotions (such as thrill, excitement or boredom) accompanying the learning process as a major factor. What do these factors require from a new generation of STEM teachers? What does this imply in adapting teacher training?

The partners of this European consortium are experts in the field of innovative teacher education. We believe that sharing our experiences in this area will allow us to understand the above questions and to define innovative research.