NSF REU at K-State: Interactions of Matter, Light and Learning
The K-State REU program offers summer fellowships to do world-class research in our friendly physics department in the scenic Flinthills. We are funded by the National Science Foundation.
Physics Education Research (PER)
For all of these projects: My students usually present their work at the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) national meeting or the American Physical Society (APS) April meeting. The summer AAPT meeting this year will be in College Park, MD in the last week of July (the last week of the REU program). If you discover interesting things, you could go to one of these too!
Dr. Eleanor Sayre: Mathematization
Email: esayre@phys.ksu.edu
The mathematization project looks at how students develop as physicists over their undergraduate degrees. If you pick this project you will join a big team of KSU researchers, including faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates. Your work will be to investigate how students solve problems in upper division physics classes using cutting edge theoretical frameworks from physics education research and archival video data of students' problem solving. If you find exciting things -- and I am sure that you will -- we will submit your work to Physical Review ST-PER. Students working on this project must have completed E&M or Quantum Mechanics.
Dr. Eleanor Sayre: IMPRESS
Email: esayre@phys.ksu.edu
IMPRESS is a program for first generation college students and Deaf/Hard-of-Hearing students who want to major in science or engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). About 20 students gather for a two-week intensive pre-freshman seminar; a larger number take a series of classes intended to improve their metacognitive and study skills, and to introduce them to college. This research is a collaborative project with researchers from RIT and DePaul, so if you work on this project you'll also work with them and their students. We have video from the two-week seminar, and some video from the academic year program; we also have data on their grades and retention. Your work will be to analyze their metacognitive and community development in the two-week seminar, and connect it with their development over the year. If you work on this project, you may have the opportunity (purely optional) to spend two weeks at the beginning of August (after the REU program is over) collecting more data at RIT.
Dr. Eleanor Sayre: DEAR-Faculty
Email: esayre@phys.ksu.edu
The DEAR-Faculty project aims to help physics faculty use research-based assessment through intuitive, data-driven online resources hosted at physport.org. This is a collaborative project with the American Association of Physics Teachers, and if you choose it you'll work with people all over the US as well as some computer scientists at KSU. Your work will be to conduct usability testing of our online Data Explorer, and/or conduct statistical analyses of assessment data from thousands of students nationwide. You don't need computer programming experience to do this work, merely a desire to learn the statistical analysis package "R", which we use for our work. (Previous programming experience may help with the learning process but is not necessary). The work of this project is being submitted to the American Journal of Physics and Physical Review ST-PER.