Oregon State University is seeking two Postdoctoral Scholars to work with a transdisciplinary team focused on improving postsecondary STEM education through various curricular and instructional reforms leading to organizational change. The positions are funded by NSF grants from the WIDER, PRIME, and FIRE programs. The Scholars’ home will be in the College of Engineering and the Scholars will closely collaborate with project PIs Dr. Milo Koretsky and Dr. Shane Brown, and STEM educators and researchers spanning the Colleges of Science and Education.
To read more about the positions, their requirements, benefits, and how to apply, please see http://stem.oregonstate.
Position 1 – Active Learning in Large Lower Division STEM Classes
· Develop a survey instrument to measure student cognitive and social engagement with a course using social capital theory and the Interactive, Constructive, Active, and Passive Framework.
· Work with faculty nationwide to implement this instrument and study the useability and adoptability of the instrument
· Support a cohort of STEM faculty as they engage in efforts to improve and evaluate their own teaching practice through action research.
Position 2 – Disciplinary Engagement in a Capstone Engineering Project.
· Join a cross-disciplinary research team studying student and expert teams’ engagement in a virtual laboratory project.
· Study the interaction of affect, cognition, and social context through the construct of productive disciplinary engagement.
· Contribute to qualitative analysis of data from the student and expert teams from a sociocultural perspective.
· Explore the connections between model-based reasoning and engineering design in an authentic project.
