 2007 KSTF Research Fellow
Erin Furtak receives prestigious
National Science Foundation Career Award
This July Dr. Erin Furtak, a 2007 KSTF Research Fellow and Assistant Professor of Science Education at the University of Colorado, Boulder, became the recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation Career Award. A five-year continuing grant, the award will allow Erin to further investigate learning progressions for student understanding of natural selection. The study, which aims to produce an existence proof of how an educative learning progression can help improve high school biology teachers’ instruction and student outcomes, is a direct continuation of the research Erin first undertook as a KSTF Fellow.
Q: How did you first become interested in this area of research?
A: When I was in graduate school, I was involved in a study about formative assessment of student ideas about sinking and floating. My advisor developed a series of formative, everyday assessments and trained middle school teachers to enact them. These assessments were all linked to what he called a ‘trajectory’ of student learning about sinking and floating. I visited some of these teachers a year after his study was completed, when I was working on my doctoral thesis. I noticed that almost all of them were still using that trajectory of student learning to identify student ideas and think about what to do next in their teaching. That got me thinking about how trajectories – or what we now call learning progressions – might influence how teachers think about instruction.
Q: Why focus on natural selection? Aren’t there other, less controversial areas in biology?
A: My background is in biology, and before going to graduate school for my Ph.D., I was a biology teacher at Wheat Ridge High School, just west of Denver. It was only natural for me to want to do some research in my ‘home’ content area. From there, it was simple: natural selection is the core idea in all of biology. It’s the explanation for why living things are so infinitely variable, and yet all adapted to their environments. It’s also an idea about which people have a lot of well-documented misunderstandings. So I thought that if I was going to spend a lot of time focusing on one topic, it should be this one.
Q: What were some of your initial findings as a KSTF Research Fellow?
A: I found that by making a learning progression for natural selection the center of their conversation, a group of teachers who previously did not plan together were able to agree upon a sequence for instruction and a core set of learning activities. I also found that teachers were better able to identify and describe the different kinds of understandings students had about natural selection, both in professional development meetings and in classroom discussions.
Q: As part of your research, you’re partnering with about 12 biology teachers in two Colorado high schools. What did you look for when selecting schools and teachers to participate in your study?
A: The National Science Foundation is committed to increasing equity and access to high-quality science instruction for all students, and they explicitly asked me to seek out schools with socioeconomically diverse students, as well as schools with high percentages of students coming from underrepresented groups.
Q: Your study will involve about 900 students over five years. How will these students be impacted by your work?
A: It is my hope that, by coming to better understand natural selection, students will be able to look at the world around them, notice the unique adaptations of living things, and consider the process by which those living things came to be that way.
Q: What do you hope to ultimately accomplish with this research?
A: The science education community is giving a lot of time and energy to developing learning progressions. As a former teacher, my question for this effort is, how do these help teachers learn and do their jobs better? My hope is that my research will help educators developing learning progressions better understand how learning progressions influence teachers’ classroom practices.
Q: What do you like to do when not teaching or researching?
A: My husband and I love to cook together, and we try out new recipes all the time. Last week we mastered grilled pizza. I enjoy traveling to new places as well – this summer we spent some time in Zürich. When I am able, I work on my memoirs about being a pre-tenure professor. I also spend a lot of time walking around my Denver neighborhood with my English Pointer, Fergie. |
Brown, R.E. & Owens, A. (2009). "Tilted squares, irrational numbers, and the Pythagorean theorem." Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 15(1), 57-62.