Qulog

The ESERA Summer school was tiring, but inspiring. :-) It’s nice to see and talk to so many different people engaged in research of some kind of science education. I even found two other PhD-students working on introductory quantum courses: Mervi Asikainen from the Physics Department of Joensuu University, Finland, and Vassilis Dimopoulos of the University of Athens. The three of us talked together with their coach Hans Niedderer

Some other things to remember:

“Asking questions is as important a skill as answering them” (Justin Dillon)
The following small ‘taxonomy of questions’ can be used when listening to a talk on research, or when reading an article, and probably as well when preparing a talk or writing an article:

on theory: what is your theory? what do you mean by the words you use (like learning, meaningful, understanding,…)
on research questions: are those the right questions to ask?
on data capture: do your methods match the research questions?
on data analysis: have you incorporated the background of the research?
and in general: why are you doing this?

Helmut Fischler (”Is the computer the only way to get students to be active?”) was our other group coach. He works on modern (i.e. quantum) physics as well.

If finding ‘the right research question’ is difficult (it is), try and think of working questions instead, that can and will change as your research develops. Related to that is the advice Susann Hartmann gave in her (excellent!) talk on doing a PhD: consider the things you write, including your thesis, as work in progress, a first draft. This makes it easier to start writing, and of course you’ll change and adapt and improve it.

I liked the workshop on Qualitative research by Jonathan Osborne. He argued that quantitative research can yield associations, but only by doing qualitative research, one can find causal explanations and understand what is happening.

(May be continued…)