Professors win awards for video vignettes

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Dina Newman and L. Kate Wright

A team from Rochester Institute of Technology was recognized in the National Science Foundation 2015 Teaching and Learning Video Showcase: Improving Science, Math, Engineering and Computer Science Education.

RIT College of Science professors Robert Teese, L. Kate Wright and Dina Newman won the Facilitators Choice, Presenter’s Choice and Public Choice for their “Interactive Video Vignettes” with colleagues from Dickinson College, the University of Cincinnati and Alfred University. Their project was one of only three videos—out of 112 entries—to earn all three accolades. The online event, held from May 11–15, showcased NSF-funded work to improve teaching and learning.

Interactive video vignettes are short Web-based assignments for introductory science students. Each vignette addresses a learning difficulty identified by discipline-based education research.

Teese, a professor in RIT’s School of Physics and Astronomy, has been developing interactive video teaching tools for 15 years. He has won a series of NSF-funded grants totaling more than $1 million.

“The vignettes are new and unique because they combine the convenience of online video with the interactivity of an individual tutorial,” he said. “Most vignettes take a student 10 minutes or less to complete, even though they often contain measurement and data analysis activities. Research has shown that this kind of active learning is very effective.”

Wright and Newman, associate professors in RIT’s Thomas H. Gosnell School of Life Sciences, are adapting Teese’s ideas to biology topics.

“We are also developing in-class activities to build upon concepts covered in the interactive video vignettes,” Wright said. “In biology, we are using the vignettes as priming activities to prepare students to think more deeply about a particular topic when they enter the classroom.”

The team discovered that developing interactive video vignettes presented different challenges for biology and physics.

“The physics vignettes have very simple experiments at their core, such as tossing a ball and measuring how it moved,” Newman said. “In biology, we had to develop more complex experiments, such as observing the effects of varying growth conditions on cells.”

Newman added, “One thing that seems to resonate with our students is watching their peers involved in real-life scenarios where principles of biology are tested.”

Teese, Wright and Newman are members of RIT’s Center for Advancing Science/Mathematics Teaching, Learning and Evaluation, or CASTLE, and its Science and Mathematics Education Research Collaborative, also known as SMERC. The center is a network of affiliated faculty, projects and programs engaged in scholarship surrounding science and math education.

Robert Teese