AGENDA ITEM: Session I: Motivations and Purposes

DR. SMITH: Again, thanks everyone for coming and engaging in this conversation and getting a better sense of the landscape of this kind of work.

The questions that the Faculty Roundtable have been asked to respond to are at the top of the page and I suspect that all of us have looked at them.

I started working at the University of Minnesota 30 years ago not intending to do any educational work. I was hired to do research. I worked in the research lab and when I taught my first course I was struck with the thought that there has to be a better way to do this and that led me to courses in the College of Education which my colleagues all thought was very strange and then I did a PhD in ed psych. I hoped to achieve peace of mind and these were questions that were really nagging me and I thought there had to be a better way and I was able to find enough in engineering education not so much locally but more nationally and internationally and I was able to sustain the work and now the things that are happening are just so exciting because the community seems to be getting cleaner, more and more interdisciplinary. We are working across disciplines and so it is really exciting to see what is happening and I really look forward to hearing the stories of our seven folks who have been volunteered I would guess by Margaret to provide their stories and I would suggest that we spend 3 or 4 minutes on your story and then open it up for a broader conversation.

DR. COOPER: I was trained as an organic chemist and I actually came to the states for 1 year to do a postdoc and met my husband while I was here. So, it left me in limbo for a while and a position opened up at the University where I was postdoctoring in which the faculty had decided that we needed a new director of undergraduate teaching and this would be a tenure track position which was very unusual at the time. It was a chemistry education position but unfortunately nobody gave the slightest thought about how I would be evaluated.

So, I applied for the position and became very engaged in chemistry education and my tenure time rolled around and they had no idea what I had been doing and everybody had their own opinion and this was, I think it was in 1970, and it was not the most pleasant situation but anyway since then I have moved on through and now I am an alumni distinguished professor. As I have moved along I have kind of progressed through all the stages of chemistry education. I started out and I was a teacher. I thought well if I just shout loud enough they will understand and then I realized that wasn't working. So, with the aid of actually support from the exec developed new laboratory curricula and then I realized well, I had better learn what our best were working on and that led me to assessment and right now finally after I have been at Clemson, 4 or 5 years ago I think, 4 years ago we actually finally have a PhD program now in chemistry education and the first students will I hope graduate this summer from it and we have been inundated with offers and positions as well and been on lots of interviews. So, the career prospects for him I think are far brighter than they were for me.

DR.IMBRIE: All my training is in aerospace engineering. I was at Texas A&M trying to finish up my PhD when NSF started up their coalition program and as part of that it was part of what was called the foundation coalition. When I was there trying to finish my PhD I also did a lot of work with our freshman program at Texas teaching the first course in engineering and the coalition project and the foundation project was all about integrating the curricula in the first year, just in time learning, active collaborative learning and at that point it was how do you start integrating and measuring whether you have an impact and being able to look at it from that perspective. My position at Purdue became available because they had a common freshman year and I was starting to help with that and not revamp but just be involved in the freshman year program with the goal in mind that we would start to be able to continue doing some of the research work that we had started under the foundation coalition but there was no infrastructure for it and if you want to be able to do research in this area then you have to have graduate students and so the outcome of that was the creation of our program for PhDs and then an undergraduate program to help train students that want to go into a variety of different places but hopefully K-12 to make systemic changes in people's perception of what engineering is all about.

So, right now we have the PhD program. We have the first class starts this year with 11 really energetic students that want to get a PhD in engineering education.

DR. LIBARKIN: I guess my story starts when I was an undergraduate at The College of William and Mary. I had a double major in geology and physics and I think that focus in science really made me want to see data.

So, actually a teaching interest in it as a sophomore and given the pioneers in geoscience ed in terms of promotion of alternative teaching I was a TA and I worked in a breakout session four or five times during the semester and incorporated writing into the curriculum, and we would have these meetings and she would say very early in the curriculum it is a wonderful thing and it is a really good thing to promote learning, and I said, "How do you know?" I still laugh about how annoying I was and I guess I carry that through. Again I was teaching and my question was how do we know whether this is an effective way to evaluate and to help students learn. So, that is sort of what motivated me really wanting to have the data to back up these things and I think geoscience education from reading the documents and knowing the field we view science education as probably the least developed of all of the fields and from the incorporating research into the discipline and in fact we are still split on what science education really means. Is it practice? Is it research? Is it teaching? What is it? So, I would like to have an effect on that discipline to incorporate cognition and psychology and education research into how people think about teaching.

DR. ASTRACHAN: I taught high school for 7 years, mathematics and then I started teaching computer science which I had no background in because the one course I had in college was terrible although the teacher was okay but the course was terrible, but I started to go back to graduate school to learn more about computer science so that I could go back to teaching high school but graduate school was a lot more fun than teaching high school and because I had this background in teaching they let me teach introductory courses and I decided that that would be a much more interesting and kind of intellectual community way to go than going back to high school and by the time I was finishing my PhD Duke was moving. They had practice positions and those faculty could not get tenure since they had no scholarly publications. So, they were allowed to kind of hang on and be promoted through the ranks and just as I was finishing the dean had decided we need to have these kinds of position in the academic disciplines as well. It wasn't clear what practice in computer science and biology meant but it was a good idea and it is still I think not clear although it is clear in different departments in different ways and the conditions are very different. Some of them probably purposefully do not have this practice subdivision because they think we all do everything. We don't need the practice people. Those departments tend to have instructors or lecturers which are not promoted through the ranks but looked on I think differently by the faculty.

I have been a teacher and only recently come to I think the science of teaching and learning. We have a group that is trying to figure out what that is and I am looking to Mark. I guess the people have been doing that, the science of teaching and learning more than we have. I think we have been largely doing curricular work without knowing whether what we were doing was effective. Eventually we will get there. That is my hope.

DR. RASMUSSEN: My original training, undergraduate, was in mechanical engineering and during that time I had taught some as a TA, a math course, and I always loved mathematics, but I also loved engineering and applied mathematics and after graduating I worked as an engineer for a couple of years in a nuclear powerplant doing some interesting work and then I decided to go into the Peace Corps which flipped everybody out at the nuclear powerplant.

(Laughter.)

DR. RASMUSSEN: Then I taught math in West Africa in a small country called Sierra Leone for 2 years and I cam back and I said, "What I really want to do is teach mathematics," and so I went back to graduate school and did a master's in mathematics and lo and behold while I was there I said, "Oh, there is a thing called mathematics education." This is so interesting to me. I didn't even know that discipline existed and so I started taking courses in it and transferred over into the PhD in mathematics education and I was fortunate enough to have some direction in terms of where I wanted to do my research. I was originally interested in calculus an my adviser said, "Oh, I think there is something interesting going on in differential equations," and so I peeked over in there and they were doing some interesting work from a dynamical systems point of view and I got interested in teaching and learning of undergraduate mathematics more generally and thinking about what we have learned from K through 12 can actually be adapted and useful for rethinking what we do at the undergraduate level, so trying to think more systemically and it has brought me here now.

DR.TANNER: I am Kimberly Tanner. I was a neurobiologist by training and the first week I moved to San Francisco I got a roommate who was a first-year medical student and within a month she had the activism to get me into a classroom in San Francisco as part of the science and health education partnership program which is often abbreviated SEP which was funded by Bruce Alberts. So, when I got to graduate school in neurobiology I had been interested in learning. I was an undergraduate biochemistry major and I decided if I wanted to go study something I wanted to study something about how animals understand the world and so I think I had a nascent interest in learning at the time but being in K through 12 classrooms is really my entry point in all this and I had the privilege and luxury of learning with elementary and high school teachers since 1991, and so when I was finishing my PhD in 1997, I had applied for postdocs in biology and bird song learning, a fascinating field, and there was a lab at Duke, and I was all wired up to go and then someone as is the case in my life e-mailed me something that was the advertisement for the Postdoc Fellows in Science and Math Education and Engineering, and they said, "Kimberly, this sounds like you." and so I thought about it and I thought well on this pathway this would be a good time to try something out. I have had a history in my scientific career of wanting to try things out and having faculty tell me that I wouldn't be taken seriously if I did that, and I listened to that for a long time, very good people but people trying to keep me very much on a track and so I decided not to listen and my desire was to study and still is part of my lab to study scientist-teacher partnerships and to better understand what impact if nay, if positive or if negative there is to involve scientists in education, whether they are trained or not trained.

So, that was a 2-year postdoc that I did in collaboration with the Stanford School of Education, the UCSF partnership program where I worked and it was a lovely experience, and I learned an enormous amount about learning a new discipline and not trying to force the methods of my prior discipline onto my new discipline.

So, after my postdoc I stayed on at the Science and Health Education Partnership in an attempt to really integrate evaluation approaches into all the partnership programs that we were doing. I was a staff person. I was an academic coordinator, and I was not on the faculty, and my charge was actually not to do research. If there was a choice my institution would push us a little more in the direction of having more scientists work with teachers than to sit down and write a paper, and so then I saw a position for a biologist educator at San Francisco State University down the road.

I thought this might be an opportunity to develop a research lab in the same city where I have a decade's worth of contacts and experiences and still collaborate with SEP but sort of branch out as well as try to understand more about undergraduate education and how we can articulate those two systems.

So, I applied for that position and once again was very privileged to be offered it and I started there in January 2004.

My lab has two lines of inquiry that I hope to make some progress on. One is that research into scientist-teacher partnerships and specifically the impact on scientists. I am very interested in that and the second line of research which is pretty new for me, but it is inspired from physics and from chemistry is to try to understand what is particularly difficult for novices to learn in biology. I think when I applied I put up a graph which the physics people will love, a graph of just the analysis of the number of publications in education research and physics and then in chemistry and then in biology and then in geoscience, but I was very inspired by the work of Rosalind Driver and trying to understand what is difficult about biology. I think biology has this reputation that it is easy but I think that it is not and I think biology has not quite put together what are those difficult thematic concepts that can carry people through as opposed to the memorization of taxonomy.

So, no one addressed this last question but I will say that teacher career prospects did not affect my decision to specialize in discipline-specific education research.

DR. WITTMANN: So, compared to Kimberly here I suppose I fit into the category of one who stumbled into physics education research. I did not know that the field existed and when I went to graduate school there were, maybe Dean can correct me on this, maybe four groups in the country, five groups back in 1994 that even did physics education research.

I went to the University of Maryland because it was a big department and I didn't know what I was going to do. So, I would have a lot of options, that kind of mind set and I was working in an organic chemistry lab doing basically biophysics looking at piezospectroscopy(?) and finding dimers and dedimerization with photochemistry and I got into a conversation with my adviser at the time where he basically said, "You have got to move past the classroom. The classroom is the wrong way to learn about how to do science," and that made me angry because I thought to myself you know I am good at the classroom. I love my math. Why is the classroom so lousy, and a couple of other things happened in my life and then I stumbled into Joe Redish's office basically and he basically beat me. I had told him that his work was stupid and education research and I was the arrogant 22 year old and then he gave me a problem, and he said, "Just work on this," and so we met the next week and we met the next week and we met the next week and we met the next week and then finally suddenly I said, "The evidence is this way because it is that," and I had done some reading and he just smiled at me and said, "I win."

(Laughter.)

DR. WITTMANN: So, I started working for him and I loved it. I just absolutely fell in love with the difficulty of the problem of understanding human reasoning and physics is a beautiful place to do that because there is all this formal logic and at the same time there is all this intuitive reasoning that contradicts the formal logic unless you really think hard.

So, you have got formalism and informalism crashing up against each other in really bad ways. It is a fascinating problem. Technically it is harder than any of the mathematical. I liked quantum field theory and all these things, too. It was harder to do the work that I am now doing than to do, even ask the basic questions, even to figure out what the questions were in education research was more fascinating.

So, I ended up finishing with Joe in 1998, and he went on sabbatical. So, I took over part of a project that he had been working with Deland on, the quantum physics stuff that I am still working on actually in student understanding of quantum physics and then in moving to Maine they wanted to have a new group and so you know we now have two faculty there and two other associated people who work with us. We have got six PhD students and so on and so forth. We are both junior faculty there but we are heavily supported by our department in asking the types of questions that are kind of on the edge of what is physics. This is a typical thing for our department. We have surface science people literally working on the edges and health physics and we don't have many traditional physics people. We have got a condensed matter group and that is about it. Everything else is kind of biophysics or kind of on the edges of what is traditional physics and so they support us very strongly and it is great to have that but at the same time there are issues that we have in terms of understanding what the requirements are for our graduate students. I would like to train graduate students to be of the same quality as every other physics faculty. They are physicists first. They just happen to do education research is our mind set and we are in a learning phase right now in terms of rewriting our tenure and promotion requirements to meet the needs of publication realms and things like that. So, there are lots of difficulties that we have in moving forward but so far things are looking good.

DR. SMITH: Marvelous. What I would like to suggest that we do next is take a moment to reflect on what these seven folks have said, think about questions that we might like to ask them or comments we would like to make as we make connections with our experience and to do that I would like to suggest you turn to the person next to you and brainstorm for a couple of minutes of questions or comments and then I will give you a chance to engage in discussion.

(Pause.)

DR.SMITH: I was fortunate to get a sense of these stories and the one thing that emerged from our conversation was the mentoring both from an encouraging perspective and the discouraging. We heard a couple of the discouraging stories, and Dan your comment was, and I a blocking on it now.

DR. LITYNSKI: Oh I have, we have all had, but I have had people tell me, "This will ruin your career."

DR.SMITH: This will ruin your career. I was told I would always be a second-class citizen if I did this kind of work and Kimberly said that you won't be taken seriously, but presumably you have all gotten some positive mentoring, too, or you found community. Yes, no?

DR. COOPER: That was fascinating because we have two very different problems. In chemistry, the chemistry education person is typically very often, and I think you made the comment, all the people that I interviewed were the only chemistry education persons in their departments and there basically was no encouragement on mentoring.

DR. SMITH: From within, but the broader community --

DR. COOPER: That was what came out was the chemistry education community nationally is very strong because of this need but then --

DR. IMBRIE: We have got the different model which is very, you have a whole, I don't know our exact count now but it is 10 or 11 faculty members for which that is their focus. It is all on education.

DR. RASMUSSEN: One thing I was going to mention in the discussion is at San Diego State we have a doctoral program in math and science education and the intention is to train biology educators, chemistry educators, math educators with a PhD in biology ed or chemistry ed in a content department. So, you don't get your PhD in physics but you get your PhD in physics education. To get into the program you have to have a master's degree in the content but you get a PhD in the education-related discipline and the intention is to find homes in content departments and it has been moderately successful. We don't have a huge number of graduates yet, but it is a growing program. So, I think a number of people have come from a PhD in chemistry or PhD in physics and then found their way into education-related areas and I think the model we are trying to develop is strong content knowledge at the master's level and then do your training, your research training in education.

DR. WITTMANN: The comment earlier about community and mentorship, in physics we have had, twice we have had times when a certain community of younger folks came together and created its own community basically. The graduate students in physics education research was something that I was part of starting. It was a mailing list basically and there were what we call lone wolves, a single faculty member with a single graduate student at some institution and they had no contact with anybody except at conferences. We have two annual conferences at the American Association of Physics Teachers is where our community typically meets and we would meet there. We got to be friends and we said, "You know, we should keep talking." Then as most of us finished our PhD work and moved into postdocs and then moved into faculty positions well, now we have the junior faculty in physics education research mailing list. It is actually the same crowd.

DR. ZOLLMAN; Some of them aren't so junior anymore.

DR. WITTMANN: We have got 10 or 15 tenured people on the list by now and we have decided that we have to keep them in because that is part of the software but we are just going to let everybody join in and the idea is that you know, a colleague of mine in Hawaii is all by himself. It is an undergraduate only institution but we have a mailing list. We send out questions to each other. We will have a flurry of 45 messages over 3 days on some topic and have a serious discussion on something and then we will have a little bit of silence again but it is us within our own structure building this kind of community because the modern communication tools are really easy. Some of us are starting to talk about blogs and wickies(?) as a way to collect our information and to just have a community standard place. As opposed to each person writing their own group page just dump it into one common area and that kind of thing is actually very important for the lone wolves out there in the field that they can communicate.

DR. ZOLLMAN; Just a quick comment. Michael is right that very early in the business graduate students went to a fairly large number of professional meetings compared to their fellow graduate students in other research areas and that was only possible because we had NSF funds that could support them to meetings. So, I just wanted to make that point while all these folks are sitting here.

Michael is right that communications are really important, that bringing together and having sit down and you know with Michael's help they started to sort of get the faculty out of here; let us all sit down and talk together. It was very critical I think to building the community we have today.

DR. SMITH: It is so interesting to find out that you are not the only one. You are not the only weird person.

DR. GUZDIAL: The question for the panelists is for those of you who are doing domain-specific education research in a domain department in a discipline department how are you perceived by your peer colleagues and the second question is given the discouraging comments, given the current state of funding, given how you may be perceived by others how do you feel about the prospects for postdocs and new graduate students.

DR. COOPER: I am in the chemistry department and I think I have actually overcome the second-class citizen thing amazingly enough. It has been a long time coming. I have a colleague who has a tag line on his e-mail that says, "Chemistry education will evolve one funeral at a time."

(Laughter.)

DR. COOPER: There is some of that and a lot of the more resistant faculty have actually retired and the new faculty accept me as a real faculty member. I am seen as a senior faculty member and I have a chair. So, I think finally that kind of difference has been overcome and I see a lot more opportunities now than there were when I was starting out.

Like I say, my graduate students have had a lot more opportunities. They go to a lot of conferences because we have NSF funding. They have made a lot of contacts and I am quite optimistic, maybe not in the short term with funding but in the long term I think that there is a sea change coming and I think that there are a lot of positions available this year, a lot of advertisements for chem ed positions all over the country.

Now, when the student goes to them what they want is still very confused. A lot of departments just don't have a clue what they think a chem ed person does and basically they want them to do everything. One had a list two pages long with everything you could possibly claim that anybody could ever do and so he was supposed to do chem ed research. He was supposed to mentor all the other faculty. He was supposed to do outreach. He was supposed to manage the K-12, suppose to manage teacher ed and on and on and on. It was ridiculous. So, I think there is still a lot of education that needs to go on in the departments who advertise certainly for chem ed people and there has been a lot of to and from even in big departments that should know better. Their faculty themselves don't know what they want and don't know what to expect a lot of the time.

DR.SMITH: And often associated with teaching.

DR. COOPER: Yes.

DR. SMITH: Rather than more rigorous research on teaching and that is a conversation that is occurring in engineering right now.

DR.TANNER: I don't want to get affiliated with a "They don't take me seriously." So, I have actually been really supported by --

DR. SMITH: I will strike it from my --

DR.TANNER: I think once I kind of got to UCSF obviously I had the luxury of contacts there and in my current department I think I am taken very seriously. There was a huge battle in my department about this position and it seems like everybody was very split. I think once I was hired all the feedback I have gotten is that I am fine. There is a debate about the position. Once the position went forward and they had the hiring process and they hired me then I am the cat's meow. So, I just went through my second year review process and the main feedback I got was we are kind of amazed that this is working at all and so I have nothing but lovely things to say about the support I get from my institution and not feeling like a second-class citizen. I have that problem that there need to be about five of me or 10 of me and there is such a poor understanding of scientists in my institution about what education research is that anything that smacks of science education is something that I need to be involved in, and the No. 1 has been teacher recruitment, science teacher recruitment.

So, I have sat across the table from my dean who is very supportive and I probably wouldn't have come here if it weren't for Dean Shellmaxler and said, "I was not hired to make more science teachers. I am happy to think about that. I am happy to be a good resource, but I came here because I wanted to do research," but that is a constant conversation that I have to have. So, I feel very supported. I don't feel like a second-class citizen and I just have way too much that they think I should be able to do. They don't understand the complexity of the issue.

DR. SMITH: My guess is that is quite common. I get asked to work with every high school group who comes in who might be interested in engineering. I am not sure who was next.

DR. WITTMANN: I would like to respond to the question from that group as well because we by definition in this room are part of the successful people and aren't necessarily the people for whom the question is meant.

I am the list owner of the junior faculty mailing list and so a message just came out that one of my colleagues was not renewed in the year before her tenure review. This just came on Friday and her department seems to have dropped her because as a whole they have decided that education research is not the appropriate activity for them to do. So, they have kept her for 4 years, 5 years but now she is gone and the same thing happened to another colleague in another institution and again he came up for tenure and then at that point they decided well, actually we don't want this and in his case he has published more than any other person in the field of physics education research over that 5-year period. He had gotten more money than any other member of his department in that 5-year period and they dropped him anyway and also he was given excellent reviews all the way through until suddenly at the very end. I don't know if we have enough data to be able to --

DR. SMITH: Did he really want to work there in a climate like that?

DR. WITTMANN: Not anymore.

DR. ZOLLMAN; But he did want tenure.

DR. WITTMANN: But the point is that there was no way for him to predict that it would go this badly until the last second when it suddenly went badly. There is another tenure case where specifically working with the school of education was insisted on by the dean out of the physics department. As far as I remember this is how it works out and then as soon as he actually worked with the school of education the support from his own research group within the physics department, the physics education group in his department was pulled.

So, then the senior staff basically said, "We don't want that," and so he did not get tenure. So, this is a situation I think in a later question of what kind of data do we need. We need to find out why the people who aren't getting tenure, what the subtleties are of why they aren't getting tenure and why they didn't find out sooner and I think it is strongly related to what Kimberly was saying about the fact and the previous comments as well that departments don't know what they want when they hire and therefore then after about 5 years they say, "Well, maybe that is not what we want," and they have played with somebody's career by that point.

DR. RASMUSSEN: Just to add to the issue of community support and the acknowledgement within the university setting we have got a couple of cases where people have gone out for tenure in biology ed or math ed or physics ed and at the department level they went through it and at the university level there were questions. Oh, is this research? What is this really? And because we have a Center for Research in Math and Science Education that is nationally known and well respected the university level committee can coordinate with the director of the center and find out is this good research in this area. We need help understanding this and because we have this organizational structure it helps support the members. The Center for Research in Math and Science Education seems to be providing some of that.

DR.TANNER: We are trying to build one based on that.

DR. ASTRACHAN: I am happy to put some positive trajectory on where things might go. It used to be that applied mathematicians were looked on with disdain. I can't speak nationally but I can speak for the local triangle area and they are no longer looked on with disdain because of the funding picture that if you don't have an application it is going to be hard to get money and perhaps that can be the case with people that are doing specific education research because if you don't have the assessment and the evaluation as part of your grant proposals maybe they are not going to go through and that might be the way that our colleagues learn to value what we do more highly because I think you are right that they look on individuals as oh, yes, you are great. Yes, we will keep you around but that stuff that you do, that is not real research the same way that maybe applied math wasn't real research.

If we can make ourselves valuable in terms of helping to secure funding maybe that is a step towards it.

DR. SMITH: I think there is support of the broader community and then in my case I was predominantly treated with benign neglect. You know, that is Karl's think. He is good at it and we do the kind of work that we are interested in and I think with that there is willing to do a variety of work.

DR. HEPPERT: I think we just wanted to amplify. Our group talked and we wanted to amplify a little bit on this theme that you guys started to talk about of do your colleagues really fundamentally understand what your research agenda is and support what your research agenda is but even more than that and, Mike, you started to talk about this very eloquently, even more than that at tenure time at the time when your scholarship is going to be evaluated do you feel confident for those of you who aren't tenured yet that those folks are going to understand how to evaluate the quality of what you have done and accept that not in the context of an expectation that they might have had for what you were going to do for the department or for the university but in the context of you as an independent scholar?

DR. IMBRIE: I just went up for tenure. So, my tenure package had gone in and I have a great department head who went carefully through my documents and had me start circulating all over the place. It is all education research. What does this mean and help people understand why this is important and I was really mad because I, also, do technical research as well and I could put piezospectroscopy in and no one ever asked a single time what that meant but at the same time if said looking at interrater reliability on something, "Well, you need to footnote that and explain what it means," and I am going, "This isn't fair." Why should I have to say that I have to define one thing but the other, but it is as he said, "This is about people. If it is technical, they think it is technical, they are accepting of it. If it is education, then they don't really know what that means and so you need to help them become educated about that and why this is important," and while at the time I fought it at least I can understand we are evolving and no one knows how to evaluate at least as we go through several different levels. Our department level actually understands what is going on but at the college level no one really understands what anything means and so you have to help them become aware of what it means. So, ultimately it is a part of making people become aware of what educational research is as opposed to just having them accept it as good research.

DR. SIMMONS: I just wanted to quickly comment in the experimental half of my discipline people work in collaboration with 400 to 1000 people. So, when they go up for tenure the random person reading that has no idea whether that person has done any work and so we always make them footnote and explain and they resent it but then they see it is necessary, but it works.

DR. IMBRIE: I will find out in March.

(Laughter.)

DR. ZOLLMAN; From the department head's point of view I do that for almost all of our faculty. There is always jargon in there that only people within a specific research group will understand and the rest of us have to understand it, and I have been on the colleagues committee. Boy, it is hard because even the English people write things you can't possibly understand.

DR.TANNER: I think this issue of understanding the nature of the work is really challenging and I don't want to spend a lot of time on this but the words "evaluation, assessment and research" have all been used on this side of the table and there is a huge difference between doing an evaluation or an assessment and doing research and so I just came on Friday from Professor Melton's workshop funded by a CCLI project and one of my fellow faculty was like, "Great, so we will just put together a little survey and we will publish an Education Research paper," and that is really common, trying to explain, no, well, have you validated those questions; have you done some pre-interviews; have you found out the population attending the workshop?" We need to spend more than 3 hours crafting an instrument. It is starting to get really exhausting and I am a generally positive person and so I don't want to be a nay sayer to their ideas but there is a really huge naivete among scientists about what it takes to do educational research and it takes much, much more work for me to come up with a really nice design for a research study in education than it ever did when I was in neurobiology. The data takes longer to analyze. It takes much longer to get interobserver reliability, I never had to do that with neurons.

(Laughter.)

DR.TANNER: I don't know what the solution is and I know that in my experience in the K-12, working with the K-12 world that a major partnership issue in having teachers and scientists work together was that misleading commonality of language, that a scientist hears cooperative learning and says, "Aha, I know what cooperative means. I know what learning means. I have got this down," and they are unaware of literally decades of literature on cooperative learning and so I think that the education of the community about the fact that there is a research base, that there are methodologies that qualitative systematic methodologies are sometimes the best way to answer your question, that you match your methods to your questions just like you do in the scientific lab. For me it is just a major issue.

DR. SMITH: We have 2 minutes. I think you can have the last word.

DR.LIBARKIN: All right, I can do it. Research education is a much younger field and so I talked to eight people who were hired in the geo ed positions. One has just gotten tenure and one is up for tenure. The rest of us are untenured, for those who were hired into these positions and I would say that those people if you look at it thematically, those people who are comfortable in their positions who feel respected are those people who are either cross listed with education departments or affiliated with centers of education. Yet, their teaching focus is the training of teachers, not all of them but most of them. So, those people who are part of a discipline department, part of a geology department who are working with geology majors or in the entry level geology courses or perhaps even graduate students they don't feel respected and in fact in terms of things that you can quantify like space and start up and teaching load, those things are all lesser, not all but I mean if you look at it generally lesser. So, in fact I will just say this. For me within my department when I was being hired I am there because they hired my husband, too. I have that trailing spouse issue. I doubt that I will be in this department for the rest of my career because I am not respected and I will not stay in a place where I am not respected for my work and I think that that is universal.

One really fast story, one woman was in her fourth year and had wonderful reviews and then she happened to be talking to the dean about something else and the dean told her, "We will not tenure you for geoscience education research," even though that was her job. So, she had to stop review ed research, pick up her traditional work and delay her tenure until just now she is up for tenure and she is not sure she will get it. They absolutely did not contact any of the science ed folks on her list of possible contacts because they didn't care. At the department level they did but at the university level, the college level they did not, even though she was hired as a geoscience education research person.