Sum24 Culturally Responsive Teaching with ESCALA4

Summer 2024 Escala 4

ASTR 4B - Introduction to Astronomy: Stars and Galaxies

Collaboration / Reflection / Creativity

Reflection on Instructional Change:

This is a fully online asynchronous course where I noticed that students struggle with the discussions, where guessing or memorization is less effective and writing skills are critical. Many students also lack metacognitive skills such as planning, self-monitoring, self-questioning, and critical thinking.

I replaced the traditional discussion format—where students post once and reply to two peers—with Collaborative PowerPoint presentations. I divided the class into smaller groups of 7–9 students and designed these activities to promote teamwork around the most challenging concepts in each module. Each collaborative assignment was followed by an individual Collaborative Reflection, giving students the opportunity to compare their contributions to the contributions of their peers.

For each module, I created a PowerPoint presentation which I then copied for each team. The first slide provides instructions, and the remaining slides each contain a different question. Students are asked to choose one question to answer in detail—enough so that their response is useful to their peers. I wrote/chose these questions for Summer 2024 and refined them for Fall 2024.

I am happy with some aspects of the implementation — for example, I like that students are answering different questions, and that they are invited to be creative. However, the quality of their work and reflections is still not where I’d like it to be. I want to provide more scaffolding to try to improve that. I also feel that students aren’t collaborating much, but I don’t want to force them to meet because they chose to take an asynchronous class. I also feel that I need to come up with a way for them to collaborate without requiring them to collaborate in real time. I also want to replace some questions because I had difficulty coming up with nine questions (one per student) of the same difficulty level. I want to incorporate more questions where students have to show how something works — for example:

“Explain, in detail, how you can use https://stellarium-web.org to answer the following questions: Which constellation will be rising in Sacramento when the Sun sets tonight? Which constellation will be rising when the Sun is setting three months from now? Three months from now, where will you find the constellation that is rising tonight with the sunset? At what time will this constellation be setting tonight? [For this question, it is probably best to either record a video or take screenshots to create a mini-presentation inside this one - just create more slides]”

**Evidence of Instructional Change**
Collaborative Assignment	Collaborative Question
Collaborative assignment instructions to students.	Sample question taken from the first Collaborative Assignment.

Before Course Syllabus

After Course Syllabus

**Faculty Bio**
	Hi! I am Vera Margoniner. I am a professor in the Physics and Astronomy department. I have taught a variety of lower and upper-division courses as well as classes for future k-12 teachers. I love teaching and am constantly revising my courses to improve student learning. My face-to-face classes are flipped and include much group work and peer interaction. I want my students to understand that making mistakes is a natural part of learning and that they must be cognitively engaged with the content to make sense of what they are learning. My big goal is for our students to be independent learners by graduation.

Funding
	This work was supported by: US Department of Education Hispanic Serving Institution Project TECH4Equity US Department of Education Hispanic Serving Institution Project STEM4Equity P031C210012 *Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or the US Department of Education.