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Refereed Education Articles!

Published: May 4, 2018

NITARP director Luisa Rebull has recently had FOUR NITARP-related articles accepted for publication!

Two are in the refereed conference proceedings from RTSRE 2017.

One is a long-awaited summary of NITARP (L. M. Rebull, M. Fitzgerald, T. Roberts, D. A. French, W. Laurence, V. Gorjian, G. K. Squires), including our lessons learned from running this program for more than 10 years.

The other one is a single author paper (Rebull), and is entitled Authentic Research in the Classroom for Teachers and Students, and describes a "funnel model" for thinking about the ecosystem of projects that get real astronomy data into the hands of teachers and students.

The other two articles both went to PRPER.

This one will appear in a special issue of PRPER, a "Focused Collection on Astronomy Education Research”
Motivations of Educators for Participating in NITARP, an Authentic Astronomy Research Experience Professional Development Program (L. M. Rebull, T. Roberts, W. Laurence, M. Fitzgerald, D. French, V. Gorjian, G. K. Squires)
This paper investigates how participating teachers describe their motivations for participating in NITARP as evidenced in these feedback forms. Analysis of self-reported data allows a mapping onto a continuum ranging from more inward-focused to more outward-focused; there is a shift during the program from more inward-focused responses to more outward-focused responses.

The other will appear in PRPER as a regular article:
Major Outcomes of an Authentic Astronomy Research Experience Professional Development Program: An Analysis of 8 Years of Data from NITARP (L. M. Rebull, D. A. French, W. Laurence, T. Roberts, M. T. Fitzgerald, V. Gorjian, G. K. Squires)
In this article, we explore how educator participants describe the major changes and outcomes in themselves fostered by NITARP. For example, three-quarters of the educators self-report some or major changes in their understanding of the nature of science.

Thanks again to all NITARP alumni for all of your hard work through the years. Having read all of your feedback forms all at once, multiple times, in order to write these papers, I appreciate anew just how hard you work in NITARP!

 

We're back from the Jan 2024 AAS and we had a grand time!