Benedikt's EPSRI Congress Presentation

At the end of this year's EPSRI, all the scholars and directors gave presentations on what they had done/learned/experienced during the research institute. Rachel had posted some prompts for our presentations, and I let them loosely guide my own preparation for the congress. In the end, I decided to show some cool pictures that I had taken during "EPSRI Camp" and talk a little bit about the research themes that I had been working on since the last EPSRI in 2010, and how they influenced my experience at this year's EPSRI.



On the first day last year, I had participated as an extra person in an energy theater activity in E2. Thinking about how the spatial arrangement of instructor and participants influences or is influenced by the instructional style / instructional intentions, I spent several months analyzing this episode after the EPSRI. Rachel had pointed me in the direction of literature on "Participation Framework Theory," and at the AAPT winter meeting 2011 in Jacksonville, FL, I presented my take on participation framework theory, using the episode from the very first day of last year's EPSRI.



This year, Rachel opened up this topic for me again with her blog post about Positioning in Small-Group Interaction. I picked it up for my presentation and had a couple of slides with preliminary thoughts for possible analyses in terms of participation framework theory.




A more recent research theme is multimodal analysis. Inspired by Eleanor's PERC paper from last year, I tried to create rich and detailed pictures of learners' ideas by looking not only at what they say but also take into account how they say it (prosody) and the gestures that accompany speech. In particular, I analyzed the video episode "Hot to Cold or Cold to Hot," in which three participating teachers in last year's E2 are trying to figure out how a refrigerator works. I presented results from this analysis at FFPER 2011 in Bar Harbor, and also at the AAPT summer meeting and PERC 2011 in Omaha. Since Virginia's research area is gestures (she knows much more about it than I do), and she had already talked about them in her presentation on Monday, I decided to focus on prosody analysis. Here is a slide with some results from my analysis from last year's data:



I had compared the pitch contour of a teacher's utterance of "know" to the typical intonation of "duh" (according to Merriam Webster online dictionary) to ascribe meaning to the prosody of her utterance in terms of commitment. However, since there are many ways to say "know" and "duh," I am tempted to do some more research on this topic. The opportunity presented itself when I observed Stamatis use the word "know" five times within one minute of dialog with "my" group in this year's E2, and Leslie led a discussion about "duh" statements in the same class, a week later. When I was putting together my presentation, I only had the video of the first episode handy, so I decided to go with "know" instead of "duh."





All these analyses were preliminary, I did not want to ascribe any meaning to any of my observations or come up with inferences and interpretations. After I had already put together my slides, I realized that I had only written up observations, without even having to restrain myself not to make inferences at the same time. I realized that apparently, my training with Rachel over the past year had resulted in me automatically keeping observations and inferences apart.

After all these more methodological aspects, I briefly summarized my big research theme, proximal formative assessment. Virginia had pointed me in the direction of a similar interaction to the "Hot to Cold, Cold to Hot" episode in her blog post, so I used some of her pictures for my slide. I did not perform any analysis on this, but I definitely want to keep it on the back burner in case I need it for further study.



Unfortunately, I had to cut off the discussion about my "EAR model" of proximal formative assessment, because the time was running out. At some point, I definitely want to continue talking to Stamatis about the points he raised (step missing between Assessment and Reaction).

Toward the end of my presentation, I briefly tipped my hat to recurring content themes
that I have been thinking and blogging about. Telling stories about energy, thinking about energy in electrical circuits, and thinking about forms and categories of energy had all been things that I had been thinking (and blogging) about before, and that had come up again in this year's EPSRI.

After showing some pictures of products of the EPSRI pastry kitchen, I concluded my presentation with a slide about "Souvenirs" that I could take home from the EPSRI, this year:



The biggest take-away from this year's EPSRI for me was to realize how much I was able to learn since last year's EPSRI, and how much I seem to have grown as a researcher. Thanks so much to Rachel and Sam for organizing EPSRI 2011 and making it an awesome experience- again!