Research on Instructional & Institutional Change in Undergraduate STEM
A schematic view of strategies for improving undergraduate STEM instruction. My postdoctoral research examines initiatives primarily located in the bottom two quadrants, while my dissertation work examined initiatives primarily located in the top left quadrant. The STEM Communities project at Texas State, which I am a co-PI on, draws on all four of these quadrants in various ways. Adapted from Henderson, Beach, and Finkelstein (2011); image credit to Alexis Knaub.
Faculty-student STEM communites
I am currently a co-PI on a $2.5 million, 5-year NSF-funded project to support sustained, culturally relevant instructional improvement among faculty-student STEM communities in the College of Science and Engineering at Texas State University and to pursue synergistic research efforts. My role centers on designing and leading the programmatic components of the project that engage faculty and studying the evolution of faculty and student communities throughout the project. You can learn more about our ongoing work here.
Instructional change teams
I spent most of my postdoctoral appointment working with Andrea Beach, Charles Henderson, and Diana Sachmpazidi to study team-based initiatives that aim to improve undergraduate STEM instruction. I have continued this work at Texas State University though a new NSF award with my former collaborators as well as Amreen Thompson, Hannah Castro, Cynthia Luxford, and Audiel Maldonado. We aim to understand what importantly characterizes how such teams are currently set up and what comprises key aspects of their collaborations. We ultimately aim to identify characteristics that may contribute to teams’ successes and limitations. You can read more about our ongoing work here.
Poster from the 2017 American Association of Physics Teachers meeting
Publications
- D. Sachmpazidi, A. Olmstead, C. Henderson, & A. Beach, 2021. Team-based instructional change in undergraduate STEM: Characterizing effective faculty collaboration.
- A. Olmstead, A. Beach, & C. Henderson, 2019. Supporting improvements to undergraduate STEM instrucation: An emerging model for understanding instructional change teams. International Journal of STEM Education.
- A. Olmstead, C. Henderson, & A. Beach, 2017. Managing teams for instructional change: Understanding three types of diversity, Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings 2017.
Virtual spaces for topic-specific communities
I have collaborated with Chandra Turpen and a larger team to study how virtual spaces can support a geographically-distributed community in collaborating around a specific instructional topic. This work has been centered on the Living Physics Portal, an online space that supports collaboration around teaching introductory physics for life science majors. We were particularly interested in discovering how to build and strengthen instructional communities by enabling more central participation of community newcomers. You can visit the Portal itself at: http://livingphysicsportal.org/.
Publications
Teaching-focused workshops
My dissertation research primarily centered on the design and implementation of teaching-focused professional development workshops for faculty. Chandra Turpen and I developed a workshop observation tool that can support reflection around workshop design, and pursued qualitative case study analysis of faculty’s interactions during workshop sessions. This work was based on observations of the national Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop, as well as the Center for Astronomy Education Tier I Teaching Excellence Workshop.
The real-time professional development observation tool (R-PDOT)
R-PDOT data for the type and focus of faculty’s engagement at a session of the Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop, in aggregate and broken into timelines. WL = workshop leader, FP = faculty participant, LG = large group, Q = question, SG = small group, Ind = independent, IS = instructional strategy. Full descriptions of the codes can be found in Olmstead & Turpen 2016.
The R-PDOT interface is available through the Generalized Observation and Reflection Protocol (GORP) developed by the Tools for Evidence-based Action team at UC Davis.
You can download the files needed to generate these visualizations here.
Publications
- A. Olmstead & C. Turpen, 2017. Pedagogical sensemaking or “doing school”: In well-designed workshop sessions, facilitation makes the difference. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 13, 020123.
- C. Turpen, A. Olmstead & H. Jardine, 2016. A case of physics faculty engaging in pedagogical sense-making. Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings 2016, 356-359.
- A. Olmstead & C. Turpen, 2016. Assessing the interactivity and prescriptiveness of faculty professional development workshops: The real-time professional development observation tool (R-PDOT), Physical Review Physics Education Research, 12, 020136.
- Olmstead, A., 2016. An assessment of professional development for astronomy and physics faculty: Expanding our vision of how to support faculty’s learning about teaching (Ph.D. thesis). University of Maryland.
- A. Olmstead & C. Turpen, 2015. “I got in trouble”: A case study of faculty doing school during professional development, Physics Education Research Conference Proceedings 2015, 243-246.
Research Related to My Instructional Efforts
Ethics, science, and society
When I arrived at Texas State in 2019, I began a new research strand focused understanding how to support students in reasoning about the relationships between ethics, science, and society. This work initially included developing, implementing, and studying physics students’ engagement with a unit on the ethics of development the atomic bomb in a Modern Physics course. My collaborators and I have also now developed, implemented, and begun to analyze data from a unit on the ethics of building the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea and are in the process of creating a new Honors course entirely focused on the broad topic of ethics, science, and society. My research partners in this work have included Egla Ochoa Madrid, Brianne Gutman, Alexander Vasquez, and Danny Barringer.
Publications
- A. Olmstead, B. Gutmann, E. Ochoa-Madrid, A. Vasquez, C. Pike, & D. Barringer, 2023. How can we design instruction to support student reasoning about phyiscists’ ethical responsibilities in society? The Physics Teacher 61, 343.
- B. Gutmann, E. Ochoa-Madrid, & A. Olmstead, 2020. “I’m not that important”: Barriers and bolsters to student agency during conversations about the intersections of physics and ethics, presented at the Physics Education Research Conference 2020.
- E. Ochoa-Madrid, A. Olmstead, & B. Gutmann, 2020. Characterizing physics students’ ethical reasoning after a unit on the development of the atomic bomb, presented at the Physics Education Research Conference 2019.
Astronomy education
As a graduate student, I co-led and documented an effort to redesign and document the introductory astronomy course sequence for astronomy majors at the University of Maryland. At Texas State, I have pursued a research with Danny Barringer to explore the interests and motivations of students who are engaged in astrophysics-related activities at our institution. Undergraduate students Kayley Green-Tooney and Audiel Maldonado contributed to this work as well. The goal of the research was to better understand what kinds of programmatic supports are best-matched to students’ interests and how creating these supports might broaden participation in physics/STEM. This research led to the development of a new observational astrophysics course at Texas State.
More recently, I supported a former student, Fatima Abdurrahman, in researching experiences of female and gender-non-conforming students in astronomy and physics graduate programs.
Publications
- F. Abdurrahman & A. Olmstead, 2021. Objectivity, culturelessness, and apoliticism: How cultural beliefs prevent the advancement of equity in astronomy graduate programs, presented at the Physics Education Research Conference 2021.
- D. Barringer, A. Olmstead, & A. Maldonado, 2020. Benefits of a student-led astronomy club: Lessons to inform instructional design, presented at the Physics Education Research Conference 2019.
Research in Astrophysics
Before switching into science education research, I studied distant galaxies in an effort to understand how galaxies evolve and are structured. As an undergraduate, I analyzed multi-wavelength observations of high-powered jets from the supermassive black holes at the centers of their host galaxies. As a graduate student, I observed galaxies whose images had been magnified and distorted (“gravitationally lensed”) by massive structures along the same line of sight.
The original and reconstructed image of a gravitationally lensed galaxy behind a galaxy cluster. Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Rigby (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), K. Sharon (Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, U. Chicago), and M. Gladders and E. Wuyts (U. Chicago).
Publications
- A. Olmstead, J. R. Rigby, M. Swinbank, & S. Veilleux, 2014. A Magnified View of Star Formation at z=0.9 from Two Lensed Galaxies. Astronomical Journal, 148, 65.
- I. Agudo et al., 2011. On the Location of the γ-Ray Outburst Emission in the BL Lacertae Object AO 0235+164 Through Observations Across the Electromagnetic Spectrum. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 725, 1, L10. (30th of 41 authors)
- A. P. Marscher et al., 2010. Probing the Inner Jet of the Quasar PKS 1510-089 with Multi-Waveband Monitoring During Strong Gamma-Ray Activity. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 710, 2, L126-L131. (24th of 32 authors)
- R. Chatterjee et al., 2009. Disk-Jet Connection in the Radio Galaxy 3C 120. Astrophysical Journal, 704, 2, 1689-1703. (4th of 36 authors)
- A.P. Marscher et al., 2008. The inner jet of an active galactic nucleus as revealed by a radio-to-gamma-ray outburst. Nature, 452, 966-969. (8th of 23 authors)