MnSTA Proudly Welcomes Our Strand Speakers to MnCOSE15
Each of the strands of the MnSTA Conference on Science Education features several content rich sessions AND a keynote speaker! These speakers have been carefully chosen to connect to the many to the areas in which our educators teach.
The MnSTA Discipline Director will be the Strand Leader for each strand of our conference, and will welcome and introduce each strand speaker. We thank the speakers for committing time to share their specialties with us!
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MnCOSE15 Elementary Strand SpeakerZoe HastingsFarm to School Coordinator
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| Discover how school gardens can enrich the connections students have with fresh, healthy food while achieving Minnesota’s K-5 academic standards! Participants will complete a variety of hands-on school garden and local food activities that meet academic standards in science. These lessons will serve as a starting point for educators to brainstorm opportunities to use local food, school gardens, and agriculture as tools for contextualizing learning. Free lessons and resources related to school gardens will be shared. | |
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MnCOSE15 Biology Strand SpeakerDr. Kelly GrussendorfInstructor, Department of Biology
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| Caenorhabditis elegans is a small worm that has served as a model organism for over 40 years in various studies of genetics, developmental biology, neurobiology and more! Because of themany advantages associated with C. elegans, they have been popular, not only in the research lab, but in the classroom as well. C. elegans allow for students to develop different hypotheses, design experiments and collect data in a short amount of time. In my research lab, we use C. elegans to understand the genetics and molecular mechanisms underlying the development and maintenance of small biological tubes. Tubule formation and maintenance is important in many biological processes and defects in their genetic regulation can result in different disorders, such as cancer and muscular dystrophy. My lab sets out to find and study the genes that are associated with these different disorders. | |
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MnCOSE15 Chemistry Strand SpeakerDr. Roger KugelVisiting Scholar, University of Cincinnati
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Mastering Chemical Concepts:
Knowledge --> Skills --> Representations --> Understanding The ultimate goal of every chemistry course should be to have students understand on an atomic level what is happening when chemical and physical changes occur in a system. This understanding must be built on a solid foundation of knowledge, skills, and representations. Misconceptions can result from a gap anywhere in this scaffold. The presentation will highlight some of the lessons learned at the 2014 AP Chemistry Reading about how to effectively test students for their conceptual understanding of chemistry and give some suggestions for ways to improve their understanding and dispel their misconceptions.
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MnCOSE15 Earth Science Strand SpeakerNic JelinskiGraduate Program for Land and Atmospheric Science
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"For the Land and Its People: The Importance of Soil Science in a World on Fire"
Soils are diverse, beautiful, interesting, and present excellent opportunities for field classes. Studying soil science in field environments around the world provides a unique perspective of landscapes and a strong connection to human management and cultures. Four tenets of experiential education in soil science that are applicable to earth sciences in general are: Quality, Diversity, Passion and Engagement. These tenets provide focused lines of effort through which to promote positive and perspective-changing views of the world through soil science. Changing entrenched views of cultures and landscapes provides an critical societal role for the study of soils and lies at the heart of experiential education in the earth sciences. |
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MnCOSE15 Physics Strand SpeakerDr. Nathan MooreAssociate Professor, Physics
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Is school-lunch more effective than school? The relevance of proportional reasoning in Physics (and other science classes)
Reasoning ability data taken over the careers of most conference attendees (from the 1970’s to today) shows both a precipitous drop over time and disparate development across students. Specifically and on average, 11 year old children in the UK in 2003 reasoned in a way similar to 7.5 year olds in the 1970’s, and while a typical class shows a spread of physical development of ~ +/- 1 year, a typical 6th grade class spans about 10 years of intellectual development! This leads to the possible claim that perhaps school nutrition programs are more effective in bringing out uniform outcomes than school itself.
After elaborating on this story, the session will dive into proportional reasoning, a fundamental reasoning skill across science, which is a key part of reasoning development. As a group, we’ll work through several proportional reasoning activities, map them to a taxonomy that’s indexed by reasoning level, and discuss how this thinking skill appears in HS Physics contexts.
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Minnesota science teachers should know about:
