Lyons named NASA student ambassador

Dan Lyons

      Dan Lyons, a University of Wyoming Ph.D. student in education-science education, has been selected as a 2009 NASA International Year of Astronomy Graduate Student Ambassador.
   The NASA International Year of Astronomy (IYA) Student Ambassadors Program is designed to provide pathways for undergraduate and graduate students to help generate excitement about NASA scientific discoveries in astrophysics, planetary science and solar physics within their local communities and beyond. IYA is a yearlong observance marking 400 years since Galileo first began exploring the skies using a telescope.
   Lyons is a College of Education doctoral student and a member of the UW Science and Mathematics Teaching Center (SMTC) Cognition in Astronomy, Physics and Earth sciences Research (CAPER) team.
   The NASA award includes a $2,000 grant and up to $700 for materials and travel reimbursement. Lyons will use this funding to back a three-phase structure supporting Wyoming teachers who participate in the Galileo Teachers Program, the official IYA curriculum designed by UW education faculty Tim and Stephanie Slater.
    A UW team will facilitate a series of workshops around the state in early- to mid-2009. To support that effort, and increase likelihood of successful implementation of what teachers learn, Lyons plans to recruit a team of undergraduate physics students, interested in astronomy, to act as resources and contacts to address teachers' individual questions. Students will be matched to a group of teachers, providing a single, familiar point of contact.
   Second, Lyons will use funding from his ambassadorship to adapt materials available from NASA to the learning needs of fifth graders.  Finally, he plans to establish an online community to facilitate peer sharing of successes and challenges as they incorporate Galileo Program lessons into their classrooms.
   Lyons says building and sustaining an online peer-based forum is critical to the success of not only his ambassador project, but to implementation that enhances student learning.
   "If we can get that going, that will have the biggest impact," he says of the proposed online peer network.
   Lyons began his doctoral studies at UW in the fall of 2008, following Wyoming Excellence in Higher Education Endowed Chair in Science Education Tim Slater to Laramie. Lyons met Slater at the 2005American Astronomy Society Conference. Dan was impressed with Slater's presentation, on instructional methods in introductory astronomy courses and the ways in which lecturers can facilitate or block student learning.
   "I was really impressed, and I've tried to work for him since then," Lyons says.
   Dan's professional goals have shifted in recent years, making a partnership with Slater particularly appropriate.
    "I looked at the skills that I had and decided that I could change my focus from doing astronomy research to doing education research," Dan says. "I feel like I could make a real contribution to the field."
  Lyons' research interests focus on cognition and learning in mathematics and science education, with particular interest in how that they occur within astronomy instruction.
   "I'm interested in how spatial reasoning abilities relate to learning astronomy concepts," he explains. "How do we break down the concepts that require higher spatial reasoning abilities to learn in order to make it accessible to people who don't naturally have that?"
    Lyons is working on a paper for publication with College of Education faculty member Stephanie Slater. The two studied how conceptual change occurs in teaching of kinesthetic astronomy, a process that involves students acting out different roles in the solar system. They hoped to understand how and why deeper learning takes place in that environment.
    "Understanding why it is more effective in eliciting conceptual change will make it applicable to any number of other fields of science where students have the same difficulty," Lyons says.
 

Posted on Wednesday, January 07, 2009