BY UBNOW STAFF

Her project, Embodied Responsive Teaching in Undergraduate Physics, investigates instructional strategies in an active, collaborative introductory undergraduate physics course where students work in small groups at vertical whiteboards to solve puzzling, open-ended problems. 

Instructors in this course use an instructional approach called responsive teaching, where they elicit, attend and respond to the substance of students’ ideas and help students connect their ideas with the discipline. In this course, instructors act as facilitators while students take the lead on modeling and solving problems. The instructor’s role is to listen and build on the ideas that students are exploring together and help guide them toward productive solutions.

Previous research has shown that responsive teaching has profound impacts on students’ STEM learning, and that students learn best when instructors carefully listen to and provide feedback on the ideas students share during problem solving, Flood explained.

But, she noted, this research on responsive teaching has primarily focused on written and spoken communication, despite the well-established role that gesture and other nonverbal, embodied communicational resources play in how students convey their ideas about STEM phenomena. 

A lot of ideas and concepts in STEM disciplines like physics are visuodynamic—requiring illustrations and animation to explain—so it’s important that instructors pay attention to all the ways students communicate information, Flood said. 

“One resource we have to communicate visuodynamic information is gesture, where we make spontaneous illustrations and animations with the movement of our hands and arms when we talk to others,” she said. “When students are learning new ideas in STEM, they convey their understanding of these new ideas not just through speech, but also through embodied communicational resources like gesture.”

The goal of this project, Flood noted, is to understand how instructors are responsive to the ways students share their ideas about physics in ways beyond words and how that impacts students’ learning over time. 

The project will contribute to the improvement of undergraduate STEM education by generating a better understanding of instructional practices that can best support students’ STEM learning and participation, she said, adding that results of the research will be used to develop training materials to help new instructors learn how to be responsive to students’ STEM ideas in ways that help engage students with problems and better support their learning.  

“By better understanding what kinds of communication best supports learning in STEM classrooms, we can help design more effective instruction and better train instructors to help more students succeed in STEM courses,” Flood said.