OSU College of Education

This August, the Oregon Association of Family and Consumer Sciences (ORFACS) and OSU partnered to offer a two-day workshop on how to develop proficiency-based assessment in the Family and Consumer Science (FACS) classroom.

Twenty nine teachers from across the state worked and collaborated to create coursework and rubrics that assesses students’ proficiency. Trisha Richmond from South Medford High School, a pilot school in proficiency-based assessment, shared her work from her FACS classroom and inspired many teachers to focus on how to teach to standards and proficiency. Teachers took course syllabuses and aligned them with FACS national standards and Essential skills, then spent an afternoon with other teachers writing rubrics that will be used to assess proficiency in the standards.

A follow-up workshop will be held in Downtown Portland on Statewide in-service day Oct 11th, 2013 and anyone is welcome to attend and learn what other teachers are doing for proficiency-based education.

For more information contact OSU’s College of Education instructor Sara Wright at wrighsar@onid.orst.edu.

College of Education professor Shawn Rowe

As an assistant professor of science education at Oregon State University, Shawn Rowe studies how people learn about science and the ocean outside of the classroom.

According to Rowe, people do most of their learning over the course of their entire lives, rather than the years they spend in formal education.

Here, Rowe talks about “free choice learning,” and how his work can help promote it.

College of Education alum and White House Champion of Change award winner Sandra Henderson

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Oregon State University alumna Sandra Henderson was recently honored in a White House ceremony for being a champion of citizen science.

Henderson is the director for Citizen Science at the National Ecological Observatory Network in Boulder, Colo. She received a doctorate in science education, with a minor in geography, from OSU in 2001.

She was recognized this week by the White House Champions of Change program, which aims to identify and recognize Americans doing extraordinary things. This year, the program is honoring people who have demonstrated exemplary leadership in engaging the broader, non-expert community in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics, or STEM research.

In 2007, Henderson co-founded Project BudBurst, a national online citizen science campaign where individuals from all walks of life report on the timing of leafing, flowering, and fruiting of plants in their communities. The data are freely available to researchers and educators who can use it to learn more about the responsiveness of individual plant species to local, regional, and national changes in climate.

“Being able to combine my interest in science education with my passion for nature through NEON’s Project BudBurst has been a career highlight,” Henderson said. “It is so inspiring to work with thousands of people across the country to make a difference in our understanding of how plants respond to environmental change. Plants have stories to tell us about changing climates if we only take the time to observe and learn.”

To learn more about Sandra Henderson’s work with NEON’s Project BudBurst, please read this blog post on the Champions of Change website: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2013/06/25/stories-plants-can-tell-neon-s-project-budburst.

For more information on the White House Champions of Change program, please visit: www.whitehouse.gov/champions.

College of Education faculty member Lynn Dierking

10 great family-friendly museums (USA Today)

dierking_head_shot — Lynn Dierking, Professor, Science and Math Education

It’s easy to add a bit of education to your family vacation. Museums have upped the wow factor in recent years, creating galleries and programs that engage the mind and imagination. “These are cool places where you get to see things that aren’t in your everyday life,” says Lynn Dierking, a science and math education professor at Oregon State University and co-author of Museum Experience Revisited.

The Chalkboard Project’s vision is to see Oregon’s schools among the top ten in the nation as measured by student achievement. The report, “Better Schools, Better Oregon: The Conditions of K-12 Education,” is Chalkboard’s regular report on the state of education and progress toward becoming a top-ten state. The report draws upon national and state-level data as well as local district data.

This is the first time the report also highlights what’s working in Oregon and draws from promising outcomes in Chalkboard’s CLASS districts.

“While the news in the report is disappointing, Oregonians should remain hopeful,” said Sue Hildick, Chalkboard Project President. “The state is beginning to turn the lessons from CLASS into statewide policy through mentoring for new teachers, meaningful performance evaluations, teacher leadership opportunities, and professional development for educators to meet the needs of all Oregon students. We do believe that these investments in great teaching will turn the tide for Oregon.”

See highlights from the report.

College of Education faculty member John Falk

falk-headshot_1 — John H. Falk, Professor and Interim Director of the Center for Research in Lifelong STEM Learning

The Lifelong STEM Learning Campus-wide Seminar Series and Discussion Forum 2012-2013 continues on Tuesday, June 11th with a seminar led by Dr. John H. Falk entitled “Investigating Lifelong Science Learning.”

The seminar takes place from 4:00 – 5:00 p.m. and can viewed in Kidder 202, via Polycom to Cascades Campus Cascade Hall 112, and streaming online at live.oregonstate.edu.

Seminar Synopsis:
When do people learn science? Why do people learn science? Where do people learn science? In this talk derived from an NSF Distinguished Lecture, Dr. John H. Falk will present a brief overview of the growing understanding of how the public learns science across their lifetime. Dr. Falk will summarize two recent large-scale research studies. The first study sought to determine the relative contributions to public science understanding made by key sources of science education – schooling, free-choice learning and the workplace. The second study attempted to better understand the functioning of the infrastructure that supports public science education in the United Kingdom by using community ecology frameworks. The seminar will conclude with some thoughts and discussion about the implications of these findings for conducting science education research in the future.

College of Education alum and new Mt. Hood Community College president Debra Derr

Debra Derr, Mt. Hood Community College’s next president, plans for a long tenure at the Gresham campus (Oregonian)

Derr started her academic career as a student specialist and counselor at Clackamas Community College in 1980. Mt. Hood hired her in 1987 to coordinate disability services and eventually promoted her to vice president for student development and services. While at Mt. Hood, she earned a doctorate of education from Oregon State University. (see also Portland Tribune)

The Center for Latino/a Studies and Engagement (CL@SE) announced FIESTAS (Families Involved in Education: Sociocultural Teaching and STEM) as one of two winning research project proposals of the 2013 Faculty Summer Stipends for Engaged Research.

Families Involved in Education: Sociocultural Teaching and STEM (FIESTAS)
FIESTAS is a collaboration between OSU’s College of Education, 4H Youth Development, and the Science and Math Investigative Learning Experiences (SMILE) program. The primary focus of the 4-H STEM program is to enhance the participation and knowledge of STEM related topics of Latino and underrepresented youth in the 3rd to 5th grades. Because of the changing demographics and increasing diversity of the K-12 population, which do not align with preservice teacher (PST) demographics, we believe that engagement with youth in culturally and linguistically contexts is needed. This project transforms the ways that preservice teachers practice STEM and empower youth within community-based and authentic learning contexts.

The present study seeks to understand: (a) How do PSTs position themselves in relation to content, children, and families? (b) How do teacher preparation courses disrupt the commonplace to transform views of teaching and learning? (c) And, how do PSTs engage in praxis in which they apply and enact education concepts in community settings? Data collection and analysis focuses on preservice teachers’ reflections: before and after their participation in Family Math and Science Nights and throughout the term in which they engage with youth in the afterschool 4H program in an ongoing way during the course.

Kathryn Ciechanowski (co-PI), ESOL/Bilingual Programs, College of Education
SueAnn Bottoms (co-PI), Elementary Science Education, College of Education
Ana Lucia Fonseca, Program Lead, 4H STEM afterschool program
Jenny de la Hoz, PhD student in Science Education, College of Education

Carpenter Lecture Series speaker Rick Wagoner

The Charles Carpenter lectureship provides a time where students, graduates, and educational leaders can come together to learn about current trends in community colleges and to network with other professionals.

May 10, 2013
7:00 p.m.
Furman Hall, room 101

Rick Wagoner, Ph.D
Research Design and Consideration for Community College Issues: An Exposition of Two Studies

Rick Wagoner is an Assistant Professor in the Higher Education and Organizational Change Division of the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research and scholarship centers on community colleges and addresses them from multiple perspectives including theoretical and scholarly, practitioner oriented, and policy. He is particularly concerned with faculty work and professional identity, colleges as organizations, and the transfer function from the perspectives of individual students, institutions, and state-level policies. Professor Wagoner’s interest in community colleges is deeply grounded in his own experience as he graduated with an AS degree from the College of Eastern Utah in Price, Utah and has worked as an administrator and adjunct professor at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona.

Learn more about the Charles Carpenter Lecture series here.

OSU College of Education

News and more from the College of Education

Proficiency-Based Teaching In Family and Consumer Sciences

Faculty Story with Shawn Rowe: Where the Classroom Ends

OSU College of Education alum named White House “Champion of Change”

Lynn Dierking shares some of her favorite family-friendly museums with USA Today

10 great family-friendly museums (USA Today)

The Condition of Oregon’s K-12 Education System

Seminar: Investigating Lifelong Science Learning

Alumni News: Debra Derr named as Mt. Hood CC’s next president

Debra Derr, Mt. Hood Community College’s next president, plans for a long tenure at the Gresham campus (Oregonian)

FIESTAS project wins 2013 Faculty Summer Stipend for Engaged Research

College of Education Commencement Celebration to be held on June 14

Carpenter Lecture on May 10th

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