a shot of tonight’s lunar eclipse
Author: cynthiadangelo
I am a researcher, working on educational games, science education, and data visualization. I like photography, soccer, traveling, and teaching my dog new tricks.
NARST 2014 Presentations
So I have a pretty ambitious schedule at NARST this year. NARST is the annual science education research conference. (It used to stand for something, but doesn’t anymore.) This year, I am involved in not one or two, but six presentations at the conference. And yes, that is a lot. Two of them are ones where I am first author on the paper and am presenting at the conference and the other four I am one of the co-authors (which is associated with a varying amount of responsibility depending on the paper). And these six papers fall into three very different areas, which makes the whole thing even more onerous.
* I am presenting a subset of the final results of the simulation meta-analysis that I’ve been working on for the last year and a half (a subset focused on science, obviously).
* I am presenting some findings relating to a large efficacy study of the PBIS curriculum (my part is focused on analysis of the weekly online implementation logs, but I’ve also been working on analysis of classroom video observations and teacher professional development). This work is largely concerned with teachers’ implementation of the new science Framework and NGSS-related ideas (mostly the integration of scientific practices with content). These papers are part of a related paper set (but there’s also another one that is in its own session).
* I am helping a colleague put together a presentation on analysis of afterschool science materials that we have been working on.
Continue reading “NARST 2014 Presentations”
My Year in Review: 2013
This post is meant to serve as my non-existent holiday card for interested friends and relatives, as well as a completely biased recounting of my year.
Travel
Well, I traveled a lot this year. More than usual. I flew 46,601 miles, going to about 22 different cities. I went to North Carolina twice, Puerto Rico, Las Vegas, Washington DC, Madison, Chicago, Chile, and a bunch of places in Southern California. Most of those trips were either work-related or family-related (my brother got married this summer!). But I did finally take an actual vacation – two weeks in Chile (I promise a post about this is going to happen).
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Whale Watching in SF
This past weekend my dad and I went whale watching off of San Francisco. We went with San Francisco Whale Tours on a six hour long boat ride that went all the way to the Farallon Islands and beyond.
Saturday morning was extremely foggy. And when I say extremely foggy, I mean it. When we were directly beneath the Golden Gate Bridge we could barely see it:
We saw a harbor porpoise and lots of birds and some sea lions on our way out of the Bay. It was still very foggy by the time we got to the Farallon Islands.
NARST and AERA 2013
My “spring conference series” just ended. NARST (the conference formerly known as the National Association of Research on Science Teaching) was in early April (in Puerto Rico!) and AERA (American Educational Research Association) was about a week ago (here in San Francisco). Here are my notes and thoughts from the two conferences.
NARST
The big topic of the conference was, of course, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) which officially were released at the tail end of the conference. Most people were referring to it during their presentations, even though we didn’t know exactly what it was yet. (Some people were conflating the new Framework with the new NGSS, but that’s a different story.)
There were a few presentations about one of the large studies that I am working on, an efficacy study of a middle school science curriculum. These presentations on some of our preliminary findings went well and I am really looking forward to next year’s conference when we will have even more results to report on and some awesome graphs to show.
Snail in the grass
I found this slimy friend outside my apartment this morning.
The Bay Lights
On Friday I went up to San Francisco with a few friends (Shane, Matt, and Drew) to go see the new LED light installation that is on the west span of the Bay Bridge. It was kind of a windy and chilly night, but it was worth it to see the bridge. We got a good view from the pier next to the Ferry Building. Here are some of the pictures I took (and a video below).
Ferry Building
And here’s a video of the bridge so you can see the lights in action!
Tilden Park
Yesterday, before (and during the beginning of) the Super Bowl, I went over to Tilden Regional Park with some friends and their children. It is a large park, and we spent most of our time at the Little Farm (which the kids loved – they could chase chickens and pet cows) and the short trail to Jewel Lake. Here are my favorite pictures from the trip.
overlooking Little Farm
it’s a chicken!
cows like celery, apparently
path to Jewel Lake
Jewel Lake
Bird of Paradise (in Elizabeth’s yard, not the park)
The Moon and Jupiter
Today, Jupiter made a close appearance near the Moon (from our vantage point, anyway). They won’t be this close again until 2026. I snapped this picture from my patio. Here’s some more info on the astronomical event.
six months in
Today marks six months at my new job. If someone had told me a year ago, when I was deep in the academic job hunt madness, that I would have found a job as intellectually fulfilling, interesting, challenging, and enjoyable as the one I currently have I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have believed it. Part of that is probably because I didn’t know this kind of job existed. As it turned out for me, everything worked out: the job hunt didn’t actually destroy me, I learned a lot about myself and the type of work I really want to do and the manner in which I want to do it, and I found this awesome job at an awesome place in California (and not half way around the world).
I have had the great pleasure to work on a number of really interesting and diverse* projects just in these first six months, many of which would never had been available to me in a more traditional academic setting. Moreover, the people that I have been working with are great in so many ways. There is a true sense of collegiality and cooperation, which I had experienced before, but never thought possible at the scale at which we have it here at SRI. The teamwork and support structure makes our large and complicated projects possible.
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*Diverse meaning that I am working on one project that reaches across the whole U.S. at multiple grades, another where I am helping evaluate a middle school science curriculum, another where I am part of a small team that is looking into the different use cases of a specific technology in science classrooms, and a big one where I’m leading a team doing a meta-analysis. Every day is a new adventure. :)
Cynthia D'Angelo 